The Wise Technical Forum is an initiative to present software developers with new and different concepts and approaches to the way they work. Led by WiseTech Global, (opens an external site) the forum convened on Tuesday 20 September, and I attended the evening to see what the forum - "For developers by developers" - had to offer.
This second Wise Technical Forum, held at UTS, attracted over 150 people. Interestingly, the crowd was not confined to any one demographic. Not only were there university students milling around the pre-event, consuming the free food, there were also many IT industry professionals. It was great to see so many senior developers attending the event, which shows that IT professionals never stop learning!
The event kicked off by introducing us to Windows development, providing an overview of the technologies to be expected in the upcoming Windows 8 release. The forum focused on the advantages of using a database interface layer known as Object Relational Mapping, and using a Representational State Transfer (RESTful) method, for example, via a web interface, to access this data. This RESTful approach is a different spin on the Service Oriented Architecture environment that many of the developers would be familiar with.
Although we were treated to a live display of C# code, the intention of the display was concept-driven rather that code-driven. This worked well for a few reasons - it served as a proof-of-concept rather than a tutorial, suitable for developers of all types. The presenters from WiseTech Global, Sebastian, Zubin, and Dimitry, were therefore able to present quite a number of examples in their one hour forum.
Though the forum had a technical focus, the concepts have been used by us all. Just how often do we depend upon Facebook, Twitter and online news services? These are just a few examples of websites that implement the exact technologies mentioned on the throughout the forum. Many of us depend on these sites and forms of social media in so many aspects of our lives.
As a student, the free pizza and drinks afterwards were a major bonus! I’m really looking forward to the next Wise Technical Forum, promised to be held at Microsoft or Google.
Alan Yeung
1st Year Bachelor of IT student
