Re: [OpenTechSchool-global] Frontend explain to backends!

Benjamin Kampmann

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Nov 20, 2012, 6:01:01 PM11/20/12

to coaches...@opentechschool.org, discuss...@opentechschool.org, Abhinit Ambastha, Giorgia Sambrotta

This seems to become a detail discussion about the specifics of that particular learning material for design. Why don't we take it there to discuss it in detail?

Bn

(p.s. Done with this email. My content reply follows in that group only. Feel free to join to stay up to date on it.)

On Nov 20, 2012 11:55 PM, "giorgia sambrotta" <g.sam...@gmail.com> wrote:

Actually i think we are referred to a target that know html and css, but not in advanced way.
Anyway taking as example the javascript workshop, the people there have no clue about js (or even html/css) before but they still make a gallery completely from scratch! So i really believe we can do something in the wake of js curriculum.

In the other hand i also see the advantages to have a basic where start and can also be a good starting point but what i meant was... no bootstrap :)
eheh not because i have something against it but i just believe that tool is made for programmers and every programmers can use it without help. We need something more... real, i mean something that can happen in a real, everyday, project.

That's why i was thinking to give a small BE app already ready and maybe we can create a html and css file with basic stuff and explanation. And they can play with it and make it their.

2012/11/20 Abhinit Ambastha <abh...@opentechschool.org>

Hi Gio,

Thanks for the quick response! I understand your concerns regarding the bootstrap, structuring things around bootstrap was done with the main aim of getting people engaged in the field. I believe it's really easy for attendees to get discouraged or bored in a pretty early stage because of a tutorial is taking them through something which is too fundamental. It's an event of a couple of hours, and if we are able to spark an interest to learn, we should be good.

I understand the fact that it's better to create stuff on their own, but when most of them don't have a clue about basic html or css, getting them to a level of understanding of the subject from scratch is ideal but can be disengaging.

Hence I was wondering if we can provide them a sort of a simple 'playground' where they can learn by modifying and understanding the effects of the change, hence teaching basics by example.

This will also limit the focus on visual interface as a tool rather than the main topic (Which could be a section from UX design).

I agree completely regarding the UX part, we should definitely narrow to a field (I had the same thought in mind!), I personally would recommend a part of interaction design concepts, in which the attendees get to model a small task in the form of workflows and make it using the provided tools.

/Abhinit

On 11/20/2012 01:26 PM, giorgia sambrotta wrote:
mhmm i'm not sure use bootstrap is good idea. I would like that ppl are able to create stuff by their own, without use any already prepared tools. I think more or less programmers already use bootstrap. That's don't really need an explanation. But i really like the idea of hosting a site.

About UX concepts, i'm a web designer so i'm also familiar with it and i love that but we should be careful because is really huge field and i think we should focus on "make one thing but make good" instead explain everything we think can help.

I guess we can just start with the workshop idea and in the mean while fix inside UX concepts.

Gio

2012/11/20 Abhinit Ambastha <abh...@opentechschool.org>

Hi Giorgia and Ben,

Thanks for the mail!
Sounds great... As a matter of fact me and Ben were discussing regarding the same.
I was working on preparing a tutorial which would help people getting started with bootstrap and give them a feel of making a website pretty quick. I was also thinking of eventually hosting the site up on heroku so that at the end of the day ppl can actually have their projects online.

As a part of the UX a few other ideas could have been getting people familier with the concepts of lean UX and how it speeds up the process, so that people in the workshop can have a clear fundamental base.

Perhaps Hanna (added as CC) can help in this workshop as she has studied UX design and is an active part of OTS. :)

Regards,
Abhinit

On 11/19/2012 12:35 PM, giorgia sambrotta wrote:

Actually at the beginning i didn't exactly know where focus it but now that we have this very interesting UX/Design Meetup i think it will be nicer give guideline how to make nicer a project where you are working on.
It will be awesome for me work with him (or who else) because for time reason and also to get some nice idea :)

So please Abhinit if you have any idea or would like to discuss about it please let me know.

Giorgia

p.s. a friend of mine suggest an idea. Take some already prepared app as a TODO list that use Api (because we don't want make the backend part again!) like this one: https://github.com/vitoravelino/sloth and create the style. Or use twitter developer api.

Or maybe just style it and use some nice simple js effects..

2012/11/19 Benjamin Kampmann <b...@opentechschool.org>

Hey Gio,

that sounds like an excellent Workshop idea. Would it be more about design concepts and UI/UX or focussed on making some simple Web-Interface with for e.g. HTML5+Twitter-Bootstrap so give your commandLine-Tools some nice visual thing? Because on the latter Abhinit (who've I added on CC) started to work on. Maybe that is something you'd like to do together then?

Love the idea!

Ben

On 15 November 2012 12:27, Gio <gio...@opentechschool.org> wrote:

Hi everyone!
We have this idea came up in previous days: i would realize a workshop about "Explain the Frontend to a Backend developers".

So it will probably some Visual/graphic rules, Html, css, and maybe also js but for backend developers. That's mean is still for a beginners but a special kind of beginners :)

In order to prepare this workshop in a properly way i need some ideas from all of you, i would know what you backend guys, would like to know about frontend stuff. What can help you to make yours projects done without asking help to some Frontend/designers guys ?

Anyone that have an idea/purpose/perplexity about it please write it.

Looking forward to yours feedbacks

Cheers

Gio
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        Giorgia Sambrotta

  Web Design





E-mail: g.samb...@gmail.com

Web:  www.designbygio.it

Mobile: 0049.15.25.62.59.677 (Germany)

Mobile: 0039.34.96.14.10.53 (Italy)

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        Giorgia Sambrotta

  Web Design





E-mail: g.samb...@gmail.com

Web:  www.designbygio.it

Mobile: 0049.15.25.62.59.677 (Germany)

Mobile: 0039.34.96.14.10.53 (Italy)

Twitter: @designbygio

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        Giorgia Sambrotta

  Web Design





E-mail: g.samb...@gmail.com

Web:  www.designbygio.it

Mobile: 0049.15.25.62.59.677 (Germany)

Mobile: 0039.34.96.14.10.53 (Italy)

Twitter: @designbygio

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Abhinit Ambastha

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Nov 20, 2012, 6:05:28 PM11/20/12

to Benjamin Kampmann, coaches...@opentechschool.org, discuss...@opentechschool.org, Giorgia Sambrotta

Hi Gio!

haha, i have no special inclination for bootstrap! :P As you mentioned giving them some base app could prove helpful, both for us in order to explain the concepts (can serve as a demo app) and for them if they want to take some elements out of it.

I guess we can just provide very simple code with the standard style definitions, even more I think it will be too soon to push them into responsive and let them figure the need for it themselves! so we can say no to bootstrap :)

It's always fun to start from the scratch! :) I always do for all my projects (off course) but as we discussed this is just to create some launchpad code around which we can base the tutorial's 'playground'.

/Abhinit

Giorgia Sambrotta

  Web Design





E-mail: g.samb...@gmail.com

Web:  www.designbygio.it

Mobile: 0049.15.25.62.59.677 (Germany)

Mobile: 0039.34.96.14.10.53 (Italy)

Twitter: @designbygio

Benjamin Kampmann

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Nov 20, 2012, 6:12:07 PM11/20/12

to coaches...@opentechschool.org

Hey,

I don't consider this an either or question honestly. When thinking about database engineers and real deep backend or also desktop developers, who've not yet worked with any web frontend stuff since netscape4, I see a good bunch of people that actually need much explaining before understanding tw bootstrap (same true for designers, who still export images for buttons imho!). But I also see that the focus of the other workshop is more in depth detail and closer to really understanding design (not only make it look decent with bootstrap). So maybe it makes sense to have two with different target audiences, which might overlap...

But just my two cents here. Up to you what you wanna do...

Bn

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OTS

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Nov 22, 2012, 5:05:50 AM11/22/12

to discuss...@opentechschool.org, discuss...@opentechschool.org, Benjamin Kampmann, coaches...@opentechschool.org, Giorgia Sambrotta

Hallo Berlin and Hej Stockholm!

I want to write a long reply but I'm on my way to school to present a 6 weeks long project to a client. :S
This last week has been all about work and no sleep, that's why I didn't even had time to read your conversations.. I'm sorry about that, I will for sure come back to you with ideas and comments on your UX/UI discussion when this project is over.

LG
Hanna

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22 nov 2012 kl. 10:58 skrev Hannas <hanna...@gmail.com>:

Hallo Berlin and Hej Stockholm!

I want to write a long reply but I'm on my way to school to present a 6 weeks long project to a client. :S
This last week has been all about work and no sleep, that's why I didn't even had time to read your conversations.. I'm sorry about that, I will for sure come back to you with ideas and comments on your UX/UI discussion.

LG
Hanna

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21 nov 2012 kl. 00:09 skrev giorgia sambrotta <g.sam...@gmail.com>:

Yes Ben! You have right sorry for the noise.
Actually when we discuss about it we thought that this workshop can fix better in js emaillist but now we have also a Design... i will introduce the discussion in both and see how the coaches react about it :)

@Abhinit please join one of these mailing list so we can develop this idea!

Tschüss!

2012/11/21 Abhinit Ambastha <abh...@opentechschool.org>

Giorgia Sambrotta

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Nov 23, 2012, 9:01:40 AM11/23/12

to Design Coaches

For sum up a litte bit i think we all agree that:

- Participants already know the basic of HTML and CSS

- we would teach how Css work and how to write goos HTML

- While we go through it we should care also about UX/UI but without go too much in details.

Btw we should invite all of them to come to our Design/UX meetup for know more about it.

At the end we have to remind that we have just one day (we could decide to do a 2-days-workshop but from my experience is quite hard for participants and coaches as well)

So now the next question is still: How to do it!

I personally find interesting what Mate said about go through Diaspora Design, that's not so far from what Javi also propose.

I would like to don't use nothing already in the web as Diaspora, Wordpress, boothstrap (Yes! Again :P) and do something similar but made from us.

Like found an app create a very basic style for it, explain it and give some tasks for continue this design.

What do you think guys?

And please guys let's try to keep the conversation here and not in global group so we can reduce the noise for people that don't actually care about it. :)

Gio

On 22 November 2012 12:15, Javier Diaz <he...@edokoa.com> wrote:

Hi, and kind of the same, I've been drowned in work the last days and had to take a moment to answer.

I think that the HTML / CSS idea is a good idea for backend people. People, backend or not, tend to see CSS as a really "esoteric" language (due, among other things, to the positions and the inheritance regarding relative/absolute... and also the block/inline/etc properties) in fact two weeks ago I was asked in surprise if "there's anyone that can make a living out of coding CSS".

I think this could also work for total beginners, of course it depends on the content, if we're trying to connect backend to frontend or giving guidelines and best practices (my experience tells me that non-frontend coders tend to write non-valid HTML) together with an explanation of how CSS works. I could assure that only explaining how to layout with CSS (from 0 knowledge) can be enough for a weekend workshop.

However, this falls into the "technical/practical part of design", and I can't help but thinking that apart from this we can also approach the theory part. Just as a parallel example, for me it's like teaching people SQL commands but not explaining them the proper way of planning a database.

Not that I see the idea of the workshop bad (in fact I think it's a great idea, the more knowledge the better), but I think there could be another part focused in the "pre-coding part" or what happens before you actually start coding, or how to approach design problems you find on your way.

Looking forward to all of this!

Javi

On Nov 22, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Hannas <hanna...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hallo Berlin and Hej Stockholm!

I want to write a long reply but I'm on my way to school to present a 6 weeks long project to a client. :S

This last week has been all about work and no sleep, that's why I didn't even had time to read your conversations.. I'm sorry about that, I will for sure come back to you with ideas and comments on your UX/UI discussion.

LG
Hanna

Skickat från min iPhone

21 nov 2012 kl. 00:09 skrev giorgia sambrotta <g.sam...@gmail.com>:

Yes Ben! You have right sorry for the noise.
Actually when we discuss about it we thought that this workshop can fix better in js emaillist but now we have also a Design... i will introduce the discussion in both and see how the coaches react about it :)

@Abhinit please join one of these mailing list so we can develop this idea!

Tschüss!

2012/11/21 Abhinit Ambastha <abh...@opentechschool.org>

Hi Gio!

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<logo.png> Giorgia Sambrotta

  Web Design





E-mail: g.samb...@gmail.com

Web:  www.designbygio.it

Mobile: 0049.15.25.62.59.677 (Germany)

Mobile: 0039.34.96.14.10.53 (Italy)

Twitter: @designbygio

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Giorgia Sambrotta

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Nov 23, 2012, 9:11:31 AM11/23/12

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SORRY! Wrong Place!!

On 23 November 2012 15:05, Gio <gio...@opentechschool.org> wrote:

Hi
As Javier said we have thousand of different task where we can choose/care about and we need to decide.
In my opinion this is the First meetup so we should try to have some basic talks and some other more "spectacular" :)

Seems that in Berlin there are no others group JUST for UX so i would suggest for start, to do a talk about UX and UI in general (a lot of people have no idea what's the difference and IF there is a difference)

And later another one.
We should understand which target probably will come in order to understand what the ppl would be interest in.
Grid? I really like. Attach with resposive design.
I found really interesting the role of designer/UX experts are fix in a Company or in Agile develop in general.

Taking from Javier's list i really like:
- A brief introduction to some principles like the golden ratio / the Fibonacci sequence and also non-perfect techinques that can make your design more or less organic or rigid

- icon-design
- Common ways of applying layer styles to achieve UI element styles in PS (and for example different states for buttons or boxes, and how you can use CSSHat to take this to CSS)

And i would like to understand better:
- Non-destructive techniques in PS

Also i would ask to a friend if he is interest in give a talk, he is very good in this kind of stuff :)

Gio

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