How we did Dart and Polymer.dart Code Labs

Last Saturday me and Jakub Škvára participated in DevFest Kraków as Code Labers for Dart and Polymer.dart. I am really happy that we had such opportunity to visit this event, meet other developers and finally visit Poland.

We did this Code Labs after our Code Labs in Prague and we wanted to do them differently. We wanted to show some easy application in Dart and then rewrite it directly into Polymer.dart to show how easy and great it is. Each Code Lab was 1.5h long.

Code Lab Applications

So we did two simple Note-taking applications, one in Dart using dart:html library and Twitter Bootstrap for styles and the second one in Polymer.dart with Paper elements.

Both Code Labs are available on Github divided into some steps.

Dart Application

Sources: https://github.com/Janamou/dart-codelab/

Code Lab text: https://github.com/Janamou/dart-codelab/wiki

Dart application

Polymer.dart Application

Sources and Code Lab text: https://github.com/jskvara/dart-polymer-code-lab-krakow

Polymer.dart application

Code Lab best practices for future Code Labers :-)

Do you also plan to do some Code Lab? After our three Code Labs I can share some best practices which worked for us:

1. Do a short presentation before the actual Code Lab. Answer on these questions: What is it? Why/when to use it? How to use it?
2. Try to code some basics with people before the actual Code Lab: Let's code our first "Hello world!". Which value is in int count;? How to write method/class/constructor/inheritance etc.?
3. Ask people if they have any problems or questions after each bigger step and help them solve it. Communicate with them.
4. Have fun! :-)

And finally, I am sharing some photo from beautiful night Kraków.

Beautiful, isn't It?