As the ability to calculate digital marketing return on investment (ROI) is critical and even the C-suite cares about conversion rates, web analytics are becoming more important. All the members of an organization start to demand more information about the web site’s statistics. As it is not enough any more to just create reports about visits and pageviews, the access to different data for different persons became necessary.

Last week we attended the 2nd annual Frontend Conference, a two-day event organized by the awesome people of the Frontend Conference Association Zurich. Our Michael Schmid (@Schnitzel) is part of that team.

This year was a great success — and at capacity with 250 attendees!

The event is split into two sections: a Design track and a Tech track. Each hour, participants choose between one of two sessions from either subject.

As the pictures reveal, the rooms were full and the speakers engaging.

At the end of the first day, once everyone's minds are sufficiently racing with new ideas and inspiration, you can unwind at a conference afterparty with tasty food, relaxing conversation, and lots of beer.

Did we mention tasty food?

If you haven't made it out to the Frontend Conference yet, we highly recommend it. The event attracts excellent, industry-leading speakers, connects people with common goals, and is generally, just a fantastic time:

Everybody tries to live a healthy life and be more active, but usually we find better things to do: go out with friends, work or just enjoy a glass of wine and a movie at home. Of course the guilty conscience is there, but it is easily suppressed. This is the problem Nike attempts to solve with the FuelBand.

The FuelBand is a small device in the form of a bracelet, which measures your body's movement and awards you Fuel points based on your activity level. You set your own daily goal. Guess what happens in the evening when you realize you're 500 fuel points off your target? You find yourself taking the stairs or going out for a walk. Welcome to your gamified life! It might sounds silly, but it really works and it's cool!

Because gamification works even better when competing in a team, every team member at Amazee Labs has a FuelBand. To make it even more fun, our daily stats are displayed on our team page! So everyone can see who was most active in the past week. Unfortunately Nike doesn't provide an API for the Fuel points yet, but this didn't stop us from finding a way to show the data on our website.

How we got it working

We built a small scraper to grab the daily statistics about fuel points, distance, steps, calories and activity time. Luckily the new Nike+ website is heavily based on JavaScript. While analyzing the profile page, we realized there's a JavaScript object called "window.np.secondMostRecentActivity." This object contains all the interesting information for a full day's worth of activity. It was easy to parse this information in PHP, save it in a database and display on the website.

Because we believe in open source, you can download our solution from GitHub!

Nike has announced they will provide an API in the future but nothing's happened yet, so let's hope this initiative brings them to publish something in the near future.

Come on Nike, just do it, so we can make it count and find our greatness!

DrupalCons are not only a great place for sessions and parties, they also provide a great source for training, "Birds of a Feather" sessions, general discussions and sprints.

Let's illustrate the power of the latter: Sprints mostly happen in a large room with a lot of working space, fast internet and enough power. The Drupal community leverages the opportunity of having so many people working together, in person, to accomplish things that would be more difficult to achieve while collaborating online.

The biggest sprint at DrupalCon usually takes place on Friday. This year there were over 400 Drupalistas working together on Drupal 8 and other topics such as documentation, usability, contributed modules, etc.

There is also an initiative called "Get Involved with Core", which helps beginners contribute to the core of Drupal. Because many beginners think that being a core contributor means you need at least five years of experience with Drupal, this is a great opportunity to show them that this is not the case. Of course there is a lot of deep and interminable discussions, but there are also many issues which are easy tasks for beginners to start with. Check out the novices issues here.

A tradition which evolved in the last few years is that Drupal creator, Dries Buytaert, commits a patch directly on stage at the sprint. Last year at DrupalCon Denver he committed a patch which was contributed by Kathryn and me.