JSConf US LastCall - Track A

I'm going to talk about how JSConf changed my life, and changes the life of those who I meet. When I first went to JSConf I didn't even go to JSConf. I went to ScurvyConf in 2010 and it inspired me. You can check the WHOIS for nodejitsu.com and you can see that it was registered on April 19th, 2010, just a day after the event. Over the years JSConf continued to inspire me so much that I started EmpireJS and now EmpireNode. These events themselves have spawned other amazing stories.

I’d like to recap the history of JSConf and all the events it helped spawn since its inception by Chris and Laura in 2009. I plan to solicit quotes and soundbites from JSConfs & Family-events around the work that reflect on the influence of JSConf US and the subsequent success of the local conferences. Expect teary moments.

An evolutionary tale, beginning at the birth of the original graphics APIs - caught between the functional and imperative worlds. Low level, and difficult to learn, but lighting-fast and capable of spectacular results. You'll see: The original, horribly stateful, OpenGL API ...and the GLSL shaders that run on top of it: functional, and powerful, and often beautiful. OpenGL then spawned its JavaScript-enabled offspring, WebGL: impressive, but built on an arcane and unwieldy paradigm. It's available in all modern browsers - desktop and mobile - yet lies mostly dormant thanks to its stateful and scary API. But hark! The slow but unceasing rise of functional and reactive programming is the missing link - transforming WebGL into a slick and user-friendly powerhouse. You'll see: the stack-gl manifesto (and its core modules) gl-react and gl-react-native: adding stunning effects in a declarative manner UI widgets and components that are not possible with HTML5 Canvas and friends. ...all while wrangling it all with Rx.js streams.

We have built a system that uses javascript to manipulate the physical RAM of an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) while it is running, to arbitrarily read or write system memory. This enables new cheat codes, wacky ways to play games, investigations into how games work, and the ability to create external visuals from a game's data, such as collision detection or advanced HUDs (heads-up displays). Using a video mixer, we can even combine views to make augmented games. Our system has an easy to use interface, allowing the creation of javascript code to control game memory, and these scripts can be used without modification in an NES emulator that has had nodejs embedded into it.

I'm going to walk you through the wilds of data handling in react. I say “the wilds” because when you first look at the landscape, it seems to be overflowing with an untamed profusion of different options. It's hard to figure out why you might want to use any one in particular. When you look closer, you'll see that it's actually easier to navigate than you might think. You just need a good guide.

This is a 5 part story about (my side project and attempted full time project in 2014) "JS Bin" and the abuse that it's suffered over the last 7 years of being an open project. The stories include tales of spam, abuse from registered users and the impact on personal life, dealing with the process of taking money, and the pain (oh...the pain) and finally police involvement (from a casual planned DDoS, child pornography and terrorism). In each section, I've tried to end on a positive note (but it's not terribly technical) even though the actual content is fairly negative and dark at times. It's an extremely personal story, but there's way too much "hey, my project is awesome, who want's a high-five?!" - this is very much the antidote!

Ever lose out on a good night's rest because your pesky cats keep waking you up at 4am for food? Rachel has. Many times. For her first project using node, socket.io, microcontrollers, and johnny-five, Rachel built a web-based feeder that delivers tasty cat chow on a configurable schedule or when triggered remotely. She'll walk you through her learning process with utilizing new tech for the first time and get you excited about trying your own projects so you can take the first steps to putting your work out and contributing to the open source community.

Conquering fears of inadequacy while enabling people to write dope poetry with each other. Basically, the struggles of working on a project alone, how to combine your interests to make something interesting for you to work on, and how to execute and spread the word.

In this talk, Glen Goodwin and Todd Gandee will walk back from the present day to the “ancient” past of Babbage and Lovelace discussing how the act of “creative borrowing” influences learning and understanding for computer programmers; how we learn by observing and deconstructing the work of others to make it our own. This includes an examination of past and current models used for “stealing” the (mostly) freely shared knowledge and past work of others like Github, StackOverflow, View Source, and Byte Magazine. Our talk emphasises the importance of inclusive conferences like JSConf in the growth of junior and senior software engineers. Programmers’ tools of today illustrate the apprentice/mentor relationship more akin to the arts than engineering.

On 23rd July 2014, the first case of Ebola was reported in Nigeria, home to a small NGO working at the intersection of tech and public health. By then over 1000 cases had been reported in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. This is a story of how we use JavaScript to fight the Ebola outbreak. It’s also a story of building good tech for hard places, where a stable internet connection is rare and emergencies are real. There are a lot of awesome technologies (e.g. CouchDB and PouchDB) out there to help you build offline applications. There is also no shortage of beginner level online tutorials to show you how to do a quick and nice first prototype, but as in any new field there is not so much documentation available to help you solve the problems you’ll find when deploying your offline applications to be used in the “real” world. This talk will present some of these problems as well as the solutions we came up with, including some open source tools developed by ourselves.

I don't want to just reprise the "BACON" talk - I'd like to talk about everything I've learned in the past 5 years (which is a lot) and includes insights on running and growing a team, starting a family, going deep into passions and more.

This week may mark JSConf's last call, but the local communities it inspired are just getting started. In this talk, Jed will share lessons learned from joining New York's JavaScripters to create BoroJS, one of tech's most vibrant local communities.

Virtual Reality using Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard and WebRTC, let's do this!

There’s a data structure that essentially makes you a wizard and that data structure is streams. In this talk, you’ll learn more about the best data structure you didn’t know enough about and how to leverage its power in JavaScript. Expect to learn about IO streams, generators, and the latest developments in the awesome awesomeness that is streams.

There are two prevailing attitudes towards the future of the Internet of Things. It will be awesome or it will be terrible. Either our devices will accommodate us more and more, or instead they’ll reveal all of our secrets to the their corporate overlords. This talk will help the audience inch us all closer to an awesome future by enabling them to build their own Internet-connected devices or at the very least understand enough about existing IoT products to maintain a critical stance. The audience will learn how to use JavaScript, off-the-shelf hardware, and a bit of tape to connect everything they own to the Internet, things like t-shirts and dogs. I will be using an art piece I made, Plant-Bot, as a jumping off point. Plant-bot is a needy house plant that can only talk to people via text message (it doesn't have ears or a mouth), in order to get what it wants (often water). Using Plant-bot as an example, the audience will learn the basics of adding "senses" to their objects, a connection to the Web, and a way for the object to interact with its surroundings.

With the rise of native apps, native wrappers, and even standards development, the browser has taken on a more behind the scenes role in web page delivery. I’ll be discussing the implications of this, and a framework for thinking about the role of the browser in the next generation of web applications.

How we can use JavaScript on our devices such as phones to change the world. From enabling those who don't have reliable internet or phone service to still be able to communicate, to protecting those in danger and protecting their identity. This all can be accomplished with the Thali Project, bringing back the peer web with our devices.