Track: JavaScript & Web Tech

10:35am - 11:25am

JavaScript & Web Tech Open Space

11:50am - 12:40pm

npm and the Future of JavaScript

npm has more than 10 million users, and they download 7 billion packages a week. We also ran a direct survey of 16,000 JavaScript devs this year. That gives us more data about what JavaScript users are doing and where the community is going than anybody else. Let us tell you about yourselves, without bias, without trying to sell you on something. This talk is about what tools you use, what the community believes best practices really are, what frameworks are on the rise and which are on the wane, and where the major pain points are for devs right now. Let us help you plan your technical choices in 2019.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

RxJS: A Better Way to Write Frontend Applications

Everything that happens in a frontend application is asynchronous; events happen - a user types something, a server responds with data - and our programs react. The traditional approach to this problem is to deal with asynchronous "parts" of your application in callbacks or promises, while working with static data structures and behaving as if the rest of the program were synchronous. After years of writing frontend apps, I still find this confusing and cumbersome. But what if we stopped trying to hide what is asynchronous and accepted that none of our data is static? This is the premise of functional reactive programming. We treat data itself as asynchronous - as streams which represent a snapshot a given value over time, and operations that can transform those values. Functional reactive programming is a major conceptual shift but one that can vastly simply frontend programming. You can use it regardless of what platform, or in the case of the web, what javascript MVC you rely on. It's an amazing technique that is the core of my toolbox in writing frontend apps. I want to help demystify it for you, and show you how you can use FRP today!

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Learning to Love Type Systems

Sometimes, undefined is not a function. As mortal programmers, we ship bugs to production everyday. Bugs slow us down, frustrate our users, and cause us to have crises of confidence. Don't go alone–type systems in TypeScript, Flow, and GraphQL can improve your confidence and help you ship less bugs. We'll start with why: a practical look at what you'll get from embracing types. Then, a gentle introduction to the ideas behind them. Finally, we'll explore the possibilities of a type system over the network.

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Fantastic Frontend Performance Tricks & Why We Do Them

The internet was invented in a time that no expected we’d be making amazingly complex applications. So how do we deliver these applications quickly and reliably and provide our users with a good experience? Why do we even have to go through all this trouble? This talk will cover the state of the art in front-end performance optimizations— from minimizing file size to preventing thrashing— digging into the way the internet and browsers work to explain why each of these practices is important.

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Desktop Applications in Electron: Pro Tips And Tricks

Electron is an awesome new framework from the folks at GitHub for writing Desktop Applications using Web Technologies, that many successful companies such as Microsoft, Slack, Facebook, and others have used in order to ship great experiences to their users. In this session, learn some common pitfalls that many developers new to Electron fall into, especially for people with a web background who are new to Desktop development, as well as learn some great new Tricks and libraries that you can use to make great app experiences for your users.