Loading…
This event has ended. Visit the official site or create your own event on Sched.
  • Registration is open every day from 7:30 a.m. until the close of the day’s sessions. 
  • 30-minute refreshment breaks are at 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. daily (Wednesday afternoon break is at 2:00 p.m.). 
  • Lunch is 12:00-1:00 p.m. daily in the Catalina Ballroom (Monday lunch is in the Shutters Hospitality Suite)
Back To Schedule
Tuesday, May 3 • 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Growing Up with Globalization

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

For many developers, globalization is an afterthought. The unfortunate reality is that many of us have not considered it. It would have been nice to consider language as an abstraction from the beginning. Most mature frameworks have already considered and implemented tools to handle their wide variety of users, which should prompt us to do the same.

However, it isn’t always simple to flip this switch for the large projects that we work on today. Products need to have a methodology for storing and retrieving strings of parameterized text that does not rely on specific inflections, pluralization, or grammatical structures. We need to provide culturally accurate display formats of data types such as dates, numbers, and currency. Timestamp storage and retrieval needs to be standardized so time zones can display correctly. There are also concerns with languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, that have bidirectional text that must be accounted for in user-interface elements. Our applications can provide sensible defaults based on regional data, but to deliver a globalized product, control of these abstractions needs to be exposed to the users of our applications. Finally, designing sound testing practices surrounding these abstractions is key to being able to rest peacefully once we have addressed all of these concerns.

During this presentation, I will walk through the experience of converting a Ruby on Rails web application that didn’t account for globalization needs at its inception, and I will use real code to illustrate how to best address these topics of globalization.

Get the slides.

Watch the video.


Presenters
avatar for Andrew Turgeon

Andrew Turgeon

IBM
Andrew Turgeon is a web developer for the Watson Explorer team at IBM in Pittsburgh. He has worked in various web development roles for about four years; his most recent experience was with a web application based on Ruby on Rails. He attended Cornell University and graduated with... Read More →


Tuesday May 3, 2016 3:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Fairbanks C