Jack Franklin

Building web applications with NodeJS and Express

In this workshop we'll dive into the world of NodeJS and build a simple web application in it. We'll look at using npm to install and manage modules before discussing the commo characteristics of NodeJS code and how it can differ to that of JavaScript you'd write in a web browser. We'll then look at Express, a handy framework for building out web applications, and how we can best harness its power. We'll examine its routing capabilities, look at its views and the different templating engines available, and also how we can interact with a database. We'll round off by creating a very simple blogging application in Node and Express.

Attendees should be comfortable with JavaScript and ensure they have NodeJS v0.10+ and npm 1.4+ installed, along with their favourite text editor.

Stu Robson

Sass: An Introduction

Sass has seen a huge proliferation in front-end development over recent years. Companies are now often including Sass as a requirement for their front-end developers when hiring. Do you want to improve your front end coding practices? Speed up your project development? Write beautiful CSS? Produce highly optimised and modular code? If you answered yes it’s time to learn how powerful Sass can be for your projects and you need to attend this workshop.

The workshop will give you the tools and skills to make you write better CSS by applying the benefits of Sass. Using both hands-on exercises (by taking a design and coding) and tuition the workshop will cover:

• Options for installing Sass on your machine
• The two syntaxes, Sass & SCSS
• Variables, mixins and includes
• Extends and placeholders
• Built in functions
• Media queries & nesting
• Compass, Bourbon and other frameworks
• Sass and front-end performance
• And more!

Please bring your laptop (hopefully with Sass installed) as this will in part be a practical workshop.

Luke Murphy-Wearmouth

An Introduction to Sketchnoting

Have you ever walked out of a talk or presentation with a rambling page of notes that will probably never be looked at again? Sketchnoting, also known as visual note taking, is a way of taking your notes and making them more memorable and interesting, while also distilling ideas down and providing an easier way to navigate through a tangle of ideas.

In the workshop, we’ll start with the basics of sketching and build up to how to communicate your ideas effectively through sketching, as well as some techniques to listen and sketch at the same time, through theory, practice exercises, live sketching and group critiques.

Scott Riley & Ben Howdle

The Road to MVP: Time–savers and time–sinks

Creating a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ is a very popular approach to proving new ideas. It involves rapid prototyping, speedy development and regular iteration. Scott and Ben are an experienced design and development partnership focussed on quickly building out products this way and will pass on valuable tips and tricks to get you working faster and smarter. The workshop will focus on rapidly creating full–stack applications, going from scribbles to a working product and still leaving time for naps.

You should be familiar with basic JS (yep, jQuery is fine) and comfortable with basic Sass (nothing too spicy, though) – this will be a fast–moving session but we promise we’ll make it easy to follow along.