Christoph Wagner brings together the best of two worlds: Polymer, Google's framework for web components, and pandas. His talk, "Polymer with Pandas," will be given on SCALE 13x Sunday at 1:30. The SCALE Team, curious about what would bring Polymer and pandas together, took a few minutes to talk to Christoph about his talk.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I’ve been working in IT for over 10 years now. I got my start as a mathematics student working at DaimlerChrysler (now Daimler-Benz) back when they were still one company. I started out with Java because it was simple to learn and popular at the time. When I graduated, I got a full-time gig working on a Java web app using Spring Framework. I was more interested in doing backend work, but since I worked at a small company, I had to do whatever was required at the time, and that was mostly front end work, so that meant JavaScript. We were using one of the early JS frontend frameworks, ExtJS (now Sencha), which let you built Windows-like GUIs in the web browser. After a 3-1/2 year stint in the Rails world, in which I also ended up coding more JS than Ruby, I decided to join Panda Strike, and move to full-time JS development (actually, we prefer CoffeeScript).
Q: You're giving a talk on Polymer with Pandas. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Well, the title really gives it all away already: you’ll be learning about Polymer, Google’s framework for Web Components, and there will be pictures of cute pandas. Either you learn something, or you’ll be entertained, or both. You really can’t lose.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: Even though I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 8 years now, this is in fact my first SCALE. I’ve been hearing about it for years now, all my colleagues have been telling me how it’s the best open source conference in Southern California. So you could say I’m definitely pretty excited to go.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: Will there be open source beer?
[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]