Gil Fink's Blog

Time To Move On

Gil Fink — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 14:34:29 +0000

A few days ago I migrated this Blog to a new blogging system – Medium. There are a few new posts that I already published in the new Blog along with most of the content of this Blog.

If you were following my Blog in the past, you would probably want to take a look at my new Blog. It can be found here.

Redux Data Flow with Angular 2 Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:38:50 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure of both co-organizing and speaking in AngularUP conference.
In the conference I moderated track A in the morning and then after lunch I delivered a session about Redux and Angular 2.
I want to thank all the attendees who came to the conference and helped to create such a great atmosphere.
You can find the session slide deck and demos online.

IoT Workshop in AngularConnect 2016

Gil Fink — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 09:31:22 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure to deliver an IoT workshop with Uri Shaked in AngularConnect 2016 conference and I wanted to share some of the inner things that happened before and during the workshop.

Last year both Uri and I delivered sessions in AngularConnect 2015 and were very excited to be there. A few months after AngularConnect 2015, we talked about doing something different in this year’s conference and we end up with thinking about a joined workshop. We contacted Pete Bacon Darwin, one of AngularConnect’s organizers, and asked about an option to do a workshop in the conference. Pete wanted to know the subject so we gave him a few options. One of the options was an IoT workshop which will use Angular 2 (The first thing we came up with was doing the Simon game that Uri presented in ng-conf).

A few months later, we got notified that the workshop is going to happen. Yeah! and more than that, Pete informed us that they thought that the workshop is cool and decided to giveaway the IoT workshop’s hardware as a SWAG to all the attendees. On the other hand, we had a really tight schedule to purchase all the hardware and had to buy >1000 kits. So what could we do? Go to plan B. Plan B included a smart Bluetooth light bulb that can change colors.

The first problem we had in plan B was the fact that we couldn’t control the attendees laptop setups in terms of OS or platforms (and we didn’t want to control those). If you ask yourself what’s the problem with that, the answer is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) isn’t widely supported and that is a real challenge with different platforms and OSs. This is why we chose Ionic 2 as the app’s platform. Ionic 2 aligns with Angular 2 and can run on different devices, so it made a natural fit for the workshop. Accept from the Ionic app, we also developed a web app that used Bluetooth web API.

The second problem came from my end… I have an old laptop (this is going to change in the near future ) with no BLE support (because of both the hardware and OS which is Windows 10). The solution we found was to create a VirtualBox VM that will run Linux and to add a Bluetooth dongle to our setup for Windows users. The VM proved to be very valuable during the workshop because there were a lot of different problems that we haven’t thought about.

Two weeks before the conference the apps were working and Uri even put the Ionic one in the Android store. We started creating the document that attendees will follow in the workshop in order to build the apps and also a small presentation (20 minutes long) that will help us to explain basic concepts in both Ionic 2 and BLE. Along the way François Beaufort from the Google Chrome DevRel team joined our venture, because he was interested to get real usage feedback about Bluetooth API, and became a third workshop instructor. There was also support from Adam Bradley, Ionic co-creator, which helped us to use the newest Ionic 2 bits and bytes (we worked on their nightly build). Last but not least, Uri even did a pull request to the TypeScript project to add the support for Bluetooth API so we will have Bluetooth types in the workshop (yesterday the PR was merged into TypeScript – two thumbs up for Uri!).

The workshop day arrived and we were very excited to see more than 70 attendees in the crowd. After the short presentation the attendees started to work on the app and all the three of us went from table to table and tried to solve attendees problems. 15 minutes before the end of the workshop we decided to stop the work and to ask for feedback. The feedback was really constructive and valuable and our favorite one was “I think that it’s absolutely amazing that you can do this with a web page.”.

All in all, we were really happy with the outcome of the workshop and that attendees were really thrilled to explore BLE further (I’m talking to you Phil Nash ) .
If you want to build the app by yourself, the workshop instructions are online. The apps source code are available on github and the Virtual Machine Image is also online (follow the workshop instruction to wire it up). I hope you will have fun and you can contact Uri or yours truly if you want to talk about the workshop.

You can also read Uri’s thoughts about the workshop.

New Speaking Engagement – AngularConnect 2016

Gil Fink — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:32:21 +0000

Yesterday AngularConnect conference published this year’s schedule. I’m really excited to return to AngularConnect for the second time. In the conference, I’ll deliver a mini workshop with my friend Uri Shaked. The workshop is called “Consumer IoT with Angular 2 Workshop” and currently it’s details are a surprise

See you there!

New Speaking Engagement – DevDay 2016

Gil Fink — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:26:12 +0000

A few weeks ago I was notified that I got accepted to speak in DevDay 2016 conference. This is going the first time that I return to Poland since I was there as a teenager. In the conference I’m going to deliver a session about SVG and AngularJS and a workshop about JavaScript patterns for big and scalable apps. Here are the details for the session and workshop:

Biological Modeling, Powered by AngularJS

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a markup language that enables building two-dimensional vector graphics in the browser. Combining SVG and AngularJS can help you build very interesting models such as graphs, gauges and even more sophisticated graphics. In this session you will get to know what is SVG and how AngularJS and SVG can play together. You will also see an example of a genome viewer that was built using both SVG and AngularJS.

Building Scalable JavaScript Apps

Building and maintaining large and scalable JavaScript web apps isn’t easy. So how do you build such things without being driven to madness? Using and combining proven JavaScript patterns will do the trick. In this one day workshop, we’ll discuss the patterns behind some of the largest JavaScript apps, such as Gmail and Twitter, and we’ll explore how to apply them in your own apps. We’ll start from object patterns and then focus on module patterns, promises, timers, and more.

Hope to see you there!

Web Components – The Future is Here – Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 13:17:19 +0000

I’ve just finished presenting my second (and last) DevWeek 2016 session.
First of all, I want to thank the audience for coming to hear me talk about Web Components.
I also want to thank DevWeek organizers for the invitation to speak in the conference for the third time.
My session explained the four different APIs that are included in the Web Components specs.
Then, I talked about two useful libraries – Polymer and x-tag.
The slide deck and demos are online and can be download from my OneDrive.

Who’s Afraid of Front-End Databases? Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 08:40:48 +0000

Last evening I had the pleasure of presenting a lightning talk in AngularJS Labs Meetup in London.
First of all, I want to thank the great audience for coming to hear the sessions in the Meetup.
I also want to thank Gerard Sans for the invitation to speak and for organizing a great evening.
My session explained what is IndexedDB and how to use it.
Then, I showed an experimental library called angular2-indexeddb, which I wrote to help with IndexedDB usage in ng2 apps.
The slide deck and demos are online and can be download from my OneDrive.

One Language to Rule Them All: TypeScript–Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 12:34:43 +0000

I’ve just finished delivering a session in DevWeek 2016 about the TypeScript language.
First of all, I want to thank the great audience that came to hear the session.
In the session I talked about the reasons to use TypeScript, a few of the language features and ended with an end to end SPA demo which was written with TypeScript.
The slide deck and demos are online and can be download from my OneDrive.

Web Components Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 05:19:05 +0000

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting a web components session in Dropbox TLV Meetup. First of all I want to thank the great audience that came to hear my session. I also want to thank Gal Bar-Nissan and Meir Morgenstern from Dropbox Israel for the invitation to speak in their Meetup.
In the session I talked about the reasons for the new web components specifications and then delved into the APIs themselves.
The slide deck and demos are online and can be download from my OneDrive.

New Speaking Engagement – FullStack 2016

Gil Fink — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 12:00:47 +0000

Last week I was notified that I got accepted to speak in FullStack 2016 conference. In the conference I’m going to have a session about SVG and AngularJS. Here are the session details:

Biological Modeling, Powered by AngularJS

Hope to see you there!