ConfPad

Virtual reality can be daunting — its unclear what you can do with it and its hard to know where to even start. I’ll introduce you to fundamental VR concepts by re-creating an interactive installation art piece by Yayoi Kusama in A-Frame, a VR web framework. So you can try it out at home, I’ll also walk you through the ecosystem of VR libraries and affordabl…

The Code is rising up to enslave us. An army of linter-plugins have given it a voice and it's angry. Clean code isn't the goal, its the enemy. Great code isn't clean, it's hot garbage—hot-swappable and easy to throw out. Code is a means to an end. When we stop fetishizing code and start fighting it, we've found the right enemy and we can get back to to the g…

Budgets, Housing, and Hurricanes. What do all of these things have in common? Civic Hacking. These were local problems that were tackled by a village of coding warriors. In this talk, I will talk about how I used JavaScript in specific projects that came out of Austin, giving citizens exposure to city budgeting with Award-winning Budget Party, and Houston, t…

Browser extensions are made of the same standard technologies as web pages - and they're becoming standardized themselves! Let's take a look at the current state of extension interoperability and where we're headed.

As a visually impaired front end developer, our profession can bring its own set of challenges; however, there are many tools and techniques that engineers can use to overcome various obstacles. I hope that by sharing some of my experiences, my talk will inspire other visually challenged people to pursue a career in front end development as well as help thos…

Like all mental illnesses, dealing with anxiety is hard because it permeates everything in my life. One specific way anxiety complicates things is by making it difficult to keep in touch with people. So I created a JavaScript app to help me. In this talk, I'll discuss how my brain works and why it gets in the way of communicating with people I care about. Th…

It's 2018. The web platform offers dozens of powerful, native-like APIs. What if we used this newfound power for evil? What kind of terrible UX could we create if our goal was to build the worst web page in the world? This talk will be an adventure deep into little-known parts of the web platform. We'll explore archaic Netscape Navigator APIs and powerful st…

We already know the advantages of typed programming languages — from code completion to refactoring to compile-time errors. But saving time in the future doesn’t create a free-flowing subprime time loan we can borrow from to rework our code right now. In this talk, we’ll discuss the various stages of avoidance we go through to justify the position that “type…

The Javascript ecosystem and npm in particular have taken code re-use and open source software to new levels. It is easier than ever before to look up a library that addresses a problem you're facing, and incorporate it into your solution. The question is - just how much do you know about this code that you're integrating into your product? Do you trust the …

We all want to consistently ship quality software. One of the best ways to do that is by end-to-end (E2E) testing our code as it simulates the real actions of our beloved users. Let’s be frank though, E2E testing is notoriously time-consuming, expensive, slow, and often flaky. Unfortunately, these issues lead to developers doing very little to no E2E testing…

npm has 12 million users, and they download 5 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 wh…

Fact: Full acceptance test suites that run in the browser are slow, flakey, awkward to write, and hard to maintain. This is the lore that has been handed down to JavaScript developers for generations. But what if that fact was fiction? What if your UI tests were fast, robust and a breeze to maintain? Introducing BigTest. The framework that believes you don't…

🎶 Imagination, imagination. A dream, can be, a dream come true. With just that spark, in me and you! 🎶 Nothing will beat the feeling I had as a child at EPCOT’s Imagination Pavilion. Before the internet, this was my first taste of technology, and it was hands on. Figment (the official mascot) made me feel like I COULD do ANYTHING, and everyone should feel …

Development is definitely an interactive exercise. Improving our craft with each subsequent release is our Picasso to the world (or company intranet). With systems becoming ever more complex, the fog of development can set in; no one person can have a clear view of the entire end-to-end system. One area that NodeJS ecosystem would improve on is dependency ma…

Web Applications are increasingly complicated. The browser main thread has unintentionally become a war zone for application logic, framework, and platform level operations required to raster code into visual representations. As we, the web development industry, have pushed more and more complexity into every frame of end-user experience, the traditional sin…

It’s been 3 years since the ES6 spec was finalized, and modern browsers are up to speed, but it's surprising how few teams have delved beyond syntactic sugar. How much of the first - and last - major update to the language in 20 years has turned out to be useful in practice, and how much is just hype? Tim Doherty will walk through his journey learning and ch…

"I just wanted to wiggle a button with jQuery, I don't know anything about magical quartz!" a disciple said to the master in despair. No matter how they try to draw pixels, the master seems to riddle them with esoteric knowledge of gleaming stones... If you are confused, overwhelmed, or feel drawing in the current state of web development despite having hone…

Despite JavaScript now being used to program literally everywhere (or is it figuratively?), we still make a distinction between Front-End and Back-End programming along with our constant search for the ✌ Full-Stack ✌ Programmer. If we're literally writing in the same language (I know it's right this time), then it doesn't have to be this way. Let's go Full R…

Very few developers know how to use mocks effectively when writing tests, and I spent a decade figuring out why. Let's take a journey, starting with the most egregious ways people abuse mocks. Slowly, we'll work our way to all the seemingly-good-but-actually-harmful mocking advice that's popular today. Our last stop will be a demonstration of how mocks can b…

Developing software iteratively a feature at a time can be challenging. Come learn about a new JS library which opens new doors into this exciting world. The first version of this targets React, React Native, and Expo development eliminating 90% of the boilerplate needed to get up and running. The idea could be expanded to support any JS project or even non-…

only one person has ever asked the question "are pixels better than javascript?" fortunately, no one needs to ever answer because it turns out they go together like peanuts and bread. by recognizing pixels in pixel art as objects with properties like color and position, and also capitalizing on the trend of graphics editors implementing javascript-powered pl…

Whether you love them or hate them, the use of a spinning loader (i.e. loading spinner) is common practice when performing asynchronous calls. They give the illusion to the end user that work is being performed; however, in reality they're just transparent liars. This talk will cover how we elegantly load and visualize a stream of a million or more data poin…

Web Developers have been reliant on compilers for the better part of a decade. But what actually is a compiler? Why are they important? How do compilers fit in with the emergence of WebAssembly? This talk will look at how this fundamental building block will unlock the next evolution of web performance.

A deep dive into the lowest levels of a Lambda GraphQL API serving nearly a billion request a month. Explore how a graph database built on Redis makes it all possible.

CSS has come a long way since the browser wars of the 90s – even since last year. With wide and growing support for CSS grid and custom properties, we have the power to inject our styles with raw data, and manipulate layouts on-the-fly. Make your JS job easier by passing data off to your CSS friends! We'll cover a range of experiments, from practical to absu…

“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” Mentoring is key towards fostering a more diverse, inclusive, tech community. We will debunk myths regarding mentorship. Learn frameworks for getting started and effective techniques. Explore common challenges and how to adapt to them. And redefine what mentoring can be. Together, we’re stronger. Learn how…

If Beethoven was alive today, he’d probably use JavaScript. Using the web, sockets and the devices in the audience's pockets, we'll interactively explore the challenges of creating a real-time and audience-driven musical performance which will be played on both the venue speakers and on the hundreds of devices in the audience’s pockets.

Implementing business logic in Redux provides a simple way to share application code across React web and React Native mobile applications. I'll give an experience report and describe some patterns for composing Redux 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 th…

The experienced Javascript developer has learned they should never use switch statements. They have tricky semantics and force a very imperative style, good riddance! Yet, this type of construct has a very important place in other languages, both Object Oriented and Functional, and it is beloved by programmers of those languages. This talk introduces the ear…

React is amazing for creating web apps -- but do we know if the React apps we create are usable by everyone? ‘a11y’ stands for ‘accessibility’ - the design and creation of websites that can be used by everyone -- including persons with disabilities. Contrary to popular conceptions, accessibility is not so much a "feature" in software development, as it is a …

Why not just use React and be happy? Tools such as TypeScript, Flow, Prettier, etc. show us that developer experience while using a tool is very important, so what would a library look like with developer ergonomics and experience as its core tenet? What kind of performance metrics would need to be sacrificed to provide an all-around better developer experie…

Machine learning algorithms can infer gender when translating from gender neutral languages to english due to bias in training data. Hardware designed to control airbag release have resulted in the deaths of Short-stature drivers and children passengers due to bias. An engineer from Volkswagen was recently sentenced to a 40 month prison term for their part i…

JavaScript is powerful because of it's reach and versatility - everyone has access to a browser and with modern APIs the browser can do more than ever before. As JS developers, we can influence the adoption of new bleeding edge technologies by improving access for the masses. In this talk I'll share a new library - qrar.js - that strives to democratize augme…

This talk will serve three purposes. First, it will tell the story of the creation of the JavaScript community in Colombia and its journey to becoming one of the largest Spanish-speaking JS communities in the world. It will highlight and explore the impact this community has had in the region, and how it set the stage for other communities to build upon. Fin…

The browser’s capabilities have snuck up on us over the years, and it’s turned into a full blown operating system! "But wait," I hear you protest, "it’s not like the browser can talk to stuff I have plugged in to my USB ports!". Ah! But it can! The new WebUSB spec has arrived, and is already supported in at least one browser today. The previous hacks of conn…

This talk is all about the weird world of hardware music visualizers (from 1977 with the Atari Video Music up to the newer modular video synthesizers of today) and recreating them in the browser! Thanks to Javascript and several newer web APIs it's possible to build a video synth to play live in a music performance. With the evil powers of "eval" it can also…

I will be speaking about my journey of breaking into tech as a queer Latinx woman, with a non-traditional background. My path into tech was very challenging: there were many times I was very frustrated and disillusioned with the tech industry. A large part of why I believe I was able to successfully break through the elite gatekeeping that is technical inter…

Machine Learning is a remarkable thing - processing enormous sets of data to make predictions just like a human brain does, only capable of much more difficult and important tasks. Tasks like finally taking the giant horse mask off of the @horsejs twitter account to see who’s underneath. In this session, Jasmine and Burke will walk you through how they used …