List of videos

Can React and JavaScript compete with native toolkits when it comes to making super complex, heavy desktop apps? Can we go further and create better-than-native applications? 🤔 Sounds like a good challenge! And this is what I decided to do with my game making software. In this talk, I introduce how React, JavaScript and WebAssembly can be used to write new ambitious apps, or port existing ones. I'll show real world examples of how we can leverage them, and the React ecosystem, to create performant applications... and how to go one step further and provide a better user experience as well as a better developer experience. These apps are not web apps, they are not native apps, they are hybrid "Native Web Apps and can provide the best of both worlds.

Performance budgeting seems to be the way to go when it comes tackling front-end performance in medium to large organizations. I'll be talking about my journey in front-end focused performance testing automation and where I'd like to see the current state of tooling go.

How can you include, welcome, provide support, safety and a confidence boost to people from underrepresented and marginalized groups that are absent from your community/workplace? Deliberate, Directed, Positive ACTION! This talk will chart the journey, and learnings, of Global Diversity CFP Day which has the sole aim of encouraging underrepresented and marginalized people to take to the conference stage. Starting with half a dozen workshops in 2016 focussed on two conferences based in Edinburgh, Scotland, this has exploded into a 80+ workshop, tech wide, world wide movement on a single day each year!

There are so many benefits to using a modern JavaScript build system, but getting one to play nicely with a very old, very large codebase is not always easy. I'll go over some of the more interesting problems we ran into at Etsy when migrating to Webpack from a system written in-house. We'll talk about working in a large codebase without running out of memory, localizing our JavaScript into 15 languages without building it 15 times, and why 4 milliseconds kept us from launching the new system for 3 months.

Most of our interactions with technology aren’t really intuitive. We’ve had to adapt to it by learning to type, swipe, execute specific voice commands, etc… but what if we could train technology to adapt to us? Programming for hardware in JavaScript has already been made accessible with frameworks like Johnny-five, but, combining it with machine learning, we have the opportunity to create new and smarter interactions. In this presentation, I will talk about how to build a simple gesture recognition system using JavaScript, Arduino and Machine learning.

In the early days of the web, building a new website would often largely involve HTML and CSS with the occasional sprinkling of JavaScript. Over the years the browsers became more powerful and the use-cases more complex. We found ourselves in a world in which we had outgrown jQuery and now faced a vast array of tools, libraries and frameworks to pick from. Sadly, with these choices also came opinions, endless debates and futile statements such as Angular is dead or "React is the best solution because of the vDOM". I believe that in order to move the web forward we need to take a step back and acknowledge that every developer and project comes with a different background of varying levels of knowledge, use cases and preferences. Framework authors learn from each other, so why shouldn't we? In this talk we'll take a look how different frameworks over the years have competed and inspired each other. We'll see how we can combine the lessons from the past and present to work together towards a future of peaceful coexistence.

Yarns, fibers, and fabrics. You have more in common with the weavers of yesteryear than you realize. In this expedition into the past of fiber arts, we'll explore how our coding art is the continuation of our ancestors at the loom, how you can learn lessons from their patterns, and maybe a thing or two about that nice sweater you're wearing.

Original Title: “WTF does 'run' mean?” And other adventures in helping someone learn to code 2019 is simultaneously a wonderful and also terrifying time for a newcomer to learn to code. There are so many resources out there! Awesome! But also, there are so many resources out there! Where does anyone even start? As a self taught engineer who’s been involved in building things on the web since the early 2000’s, helping a friend with zero previous experience prepare for, and get through, learning to be a junior engineer in 2019 was an eye opening experience – and in turn taught me a lot about being a better engineer.

Traveling to JSConf US from another country? You probably had to pay an arm and a leg for a data roaming package on your phone. But there’s a better way! What if I told you that you could stay connected to the internet with a phone that can only send and receive text messages? In this talk we’ll build our own browser that makes all requests over SMS, so that next time you can forget about that fancy data package.