I’m headed to San Antonio for COMMON’s POWERUp18 conference to mingle with industry people, collaborate with colleagues from far and wide, and of course, this year I also have several speaking sessions scheduled.
In addition to working in Fresche Solutions’ expo area, I have 5 speaking sessions: one Fresche-focused, and four educational sessions.
First thing Monday morning at 8:00 AM is my Vendor Session: Green Screen Modernization with Presto - A Mobile Focus. I will be showcasing how our Presto solution makes it easy to transform green screens into a web GUI that users expect in this day and age. I will focus in particular on some of Presto’s latest feature additions like designing truly responsive pages that allow users to access their applications on the device of their choosing.
Following that, at 1:30 PM on Monday, is my first educational session: Browser Development Tools - Critical Insights for Web Developers. This is a brand-new session, and one that I’m very excited to add to my session list. Very often during other technical sessions, I demonstrate using browser development tools to highlight particular features, and attendees always have questions about these tools, and how they can leverage them in their own development processes. I will show how these tools help you to identify page loading bottlenecks, inspect the building blocks of the page (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) as well as some of the mobile emulation features that can be leveraged to learn how your web applications will appear on different devices.
On the same day, at 4:00 PM, I have another session covering Designing Responsive IBM i Mobile Web Applications.
Although there is a little bit of crossover with both of the previous sessions, this session really delves into what is possible with IBM i Web Applications, and I discuss some of the best practices for responsive development, and why this once trending design concept has now really become standard for any new web application development.
Plenty of live examples, screenshots and case studies to showcase the possibilities will whet your appetite for designing your own responsive applications.
Later Monday night, Fresche Solutions is hosting our Customer Appreciation event, where we all enjoy an informal meet up, making new connections and discussing possibilities. More details are here!
That’s going to be one busy Monday!
Tuesday is a lighter day for me, where I’ll be working at the Fresche Solutions expo booth, and meeting with customers and prospects to discuss how our solutions, services, and people can help! Hopefully I’ll also be able to get to a few sessions myself to hear from some of the incredible speakers this event brings out.
Turning to Wednesday, I have two final sessions.
First up, at 1:30 PM, is Web Design Tips for Green Screeners. Many of our customers are coming exclusively from the green screen world, either with advanced RPG or COBOL skillsets, and moving to a web front end means coming to terms with a significant paradigm shift in terms of User Interface/User Interaction (UI/UX).
I’ll introduce you to some of those concepts, and really help with some resources and examples to help get you moving down that same path. You’ll also gain an understanding of how to leverage these new skills to assist in your modernization and new web application development efforts.
Lastly, and indeed the very last session time slot of the conference, at 5:15 PM, I’m tackling another new session, APIs: Connecting your IBM i to the Outside World.
I’ll be showing how your IBM i can access and provide data and services through APIs. APIs allow us to really extend the scope of what the IBM i can do, and integrate with. Several examples and demonstrations will give you real-world examples of how APIs could be leveraged within your own environment.
Very shortly after that last session, I’ll be attending the COMMON Education Foundation’s Closing Fiesta at La Villita to wind down and relax before returning back home on Thursday afternoon.
Let me know in the comments what you’re looking forward to in San Antonio! I hope to see you there! The full list of sessions and Fresche speakers can be found here.
