I’ve just arrived from Europe. Still recovering from the jet lag and buzzing from the Nooku Jam 2014 which was held in the city of Leuven. This city is about 20 minutes from Brussels if you take the train. I was told that Leuven is a university town and most of its residents are academics and students.
This beautiful city has a lot to offer and I’m not just talking about their beer and chocolate.
Nooku Jam is an unconference for the hackers, hackerpreneurs, and designers to share their technical knowledge and demo some of the projects and prototypes that they have been working on. This event is organized by Timble who is the creator of the Nooku PHP framework that provides a lean and mean architecture. This year we had 23 participants from 10 different countries and they shared a great heap of knowledge and prototypes with everyone. We met in a creative shared workspace called the Flanders DC.
Day 1
The first day started with a workshop done by Timble, Beyounic, and rmdStudio and sharing some of the projects that they had worked on this year as well as brainstorming about the upcoming products and services that are going to be developed.
It was particularly amazing to see Johan Janssens – Timble and Nooku founder – at work in person. His interaction and communication with his team are a great example of leadership of a nurturing kind.
Day 2
The second day started with brainstorming on topics that we wanted to talk or learn about. The boards were quickly filled up with sticky notes and participants were voting using their dot stickers.
I was pleased and honoured to see so much interest in the Anahita presentation called: Connecting The Dots – building more insightful knowledge apps.
Herman Peeren from YEPR gave us a great talk about software design patterns followed by a talk by Johan Janssens on the same topic.
and here I am giving the talk – Connecting The Dots – on building more insightful knowledge apps as well as the Anahita project.
Other talks delivered on this were about Composer, GruntJS, The Ohanah extension for Joomla, and a state-of-the-art presentation by Johan Janssens about the Nooku 2.0.
and then we all got down to some hacking and coding …
and more hacking and coding …
and even more hacking and coding …
and then we celebrated!
Day 3
Johan Janssens started the day with a great talk about different types of open source licenses. Afterwards the focus of the day was mainly on different types of Javascript technologies such as AngularJS, EmberJS, Node.js, Node-WebKit, as well as mobile app development technologies such as ionic and Mobile First design.
Tom Janssens gave a talk about Mobile First and responsive design for the web.
Jisse Reitsma from YIERO has written a book: Programming Joomla! Plugins go and check it out.
The highlight of the evening for me was when the Nooku tribe gave me the first prize for the best talk of the event. I feel so honoured. Thank you Nooku tribe!
and we celebrated the Nooku 2.0 Birth release with a lovely cake. Congratulations Johan Janssens and the Nooku tribe. You have created an amazing PHP framework and architecture.
So in the end
My special thanks to the man in red who has been a great source of knowledge, inspiration, and leadership who happens to be my best friend and advisor: Mr. Johan Janssens.
and this very knowledgable fellow on the right whose passion for his work can move mountains: Mr. Tom Janssens
I had an amazing time and learned so much on this trip! I can’t wait to apply the newly gained knowledge to the 2015 projects in rmdStudio and Anahita. I am already looking forward to the next year’s NookuJam. I bet it will be great.
and all the amazing new friends that I made on this trip.
and of course the beautiful city of Leuven, Belgium. I can’t wait to visit you again someday.