List of videos

On July 21st, 2007, 15 million people around the world took a break from their daily routine to read the final installment of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter series. Through this spellbinding story, Rowling crafted a global phenomenon, outselling every book in history with the exception of the Bible and Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. What can the Harry Potter phenomenon, which was largely fueled by the Internet, teach us about JavaScript? More than you might think. In my talk, I’ll highlight some similarities between the adoption of Harry Potter and JavaScript. The spread of both HP and JavaScript occurred at the same time in the late 90s, and each phenomenon had a role in shaping the other. I’ll also discuss how the magic of Harry Potter and its international fan following can inform the global JavaScript community. After the talk, you’ll understand the evolution of JavaScript from an entirely new perspective and you’ll be exposed to a few magical JavaScript APIs. Transcript & slides: http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/sara-robinson-what-harry-potter-can-teach-us-about-javascript.html License: For reuse of this video under a more permissive license please get in touch with us. The speakers retain the copyright for their performances.

Everybody loves the Gruntfile, except for those who have seen the True Path and are now creating everything in Gulp, except for those of us that simply don’t understand the fuss because Make has “done all of that for years”. Make gets an awful rap for being obtuse and difficult to understand and this is often down to some common misunderstandings over what Make actually is. Most first attempts at using it (including my own) end up looking like badly written shell code. Make provides a wonderfully declarative DSL for building projects; complete with all of the pattern matching features one is still waiting in vane for in some supposedly modern languages. I am here to demystify some of this and you will hopefully leave this room thinking “Wow, I didn’t know Make could do that…” Transcript & slides: http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/rob-ashton-got-make.html License: For reuse of this video under a more permissive license please get in touch with us. The speakers retain the copyright for their performances.

I’m not going to lie - building front end JavaScript applications can be hard. Why? Because state, that’s why. When writing code for the client, we are almost entirely interested in how to best structure a would be mess of events and state. As our code base grows and the number of possible states increases, if we aren’t careful we can end up in the fetal position, alone and questioning our life choices. In this talk we will take a look at some of the patterns we see being commonly applied in client app’s to see if the give us ways of handling state and state transition in a scaleable, maintainable fashion. Then we will take a look at some tactics you can use to help you better embrace both state and events, without sacrificing clarity in your architecture. Transcript & slides: http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/amy-palamountain-enemy-of-the-state.html License: For reuse of this video under a more permissive license please get in touch with us. The speakers retain the copyright for their performances.

By @thedeftone @kahliltweets @bonotes

We have ethical responsibilities when coding. We’re able to extract remarkably precise intuitions about an individual. But do we have a right to know what they didn’t consent to share, even when they willingly shared the data that leads us there? A major retailer’s data-driven marketing accidentally revealed to a teen’s family that she was pregnant. Eek. What are our obligations to people who did not expect themselves to be so intimately known without sharing directly? How do we mitigate against unintended outcomes? For instance, an activity tracker carelessly revealed users’ sexual activity data to search engines. A social network’s algorithm accidentally triggered painful memories for grieving families who’d recently experienced death of their child and other loved ones. We design software for humans. Balancing human needs and business specs can be tough. It’s crucial that we learn how to build in systematic empathy. Intro music by @halfbyte

In an industry that is so focused frameworks & tooling, we tend to lose sight of the people behind the products and how we work with them. I’ve found empathy to be a powerful resource while collaborating with teams inside companies and across the open source community. By breaking down The Other Side of Empathy, I will demonstrate how applying its principles to your development process will benefit the community and the products they create. Intro music by @halfbyte

Imagine many teams distributed over the globe working on different services. Each team is small enough to be fed with two large pizzas. Got that? Welcome to AWS! This is what makes us successful, but it also brings its own challenges. One of them is ensuring accessibility, performance, and consistency across all our UIs. Because of this we chose to explore Web Components in the last year and I want to share what we have learned. I will go over the current state and support of all Web Components building blocks. It will get technical fast as I tell you why polyfills did not work for us. We continued to investigate the underlying technology and wrote our own library that I want to share with you. As no goal can be achieved by ‘only’ producing code, I will also explain what I did in addition. Intro music by @halfbyte

Are you interested in learning about functional programming? Are you reaching the limits of abstraction when programming in JavaScript? Do you sometimes find yourself lost in a forest of callbacks? In this talk we explore functional programming concepts, which help us create powerful abstractions to master complex problems and create more simple and elegant programs. JavaScript allows us to ease into the functional programming style, letting us focus just on the concepts, without the distraction of learning a specific functional programming language. To make the dry functional programming concepts more digestible, we use cooking as an analogy. And since the logician Haskell Curry invented functional programming, we combine our journey in JavaScript with examples and recipes for tasty curry dishes. So even if you get stuck on concepts like higher order functions, continuation passing style or monads, you will at least not go home hungry. Intro music by @halfbyte

Every time we solve an everyday programming problem we learn from its solution. When we come across a similar problem later on, we think “aha! I’ve seen this before! I know how to solve it!”. Many of us are also familiar with design patterns, which aim to solve entire classes of problems. There also exists, however, a different kind of pattern. But, as opposed to help you structure a whole compiler or application, these patterns love hiding in small things like methods or functions, or even binary operations. They whisper to you when you concatenate two strings or map over a list. These abstractions have superpowers, too. They can separate the what from the when, or from the how. They can add together things other than numbers. They can control time. In this talk you will discover the amazing power of small abstractions. After, you’ll start hearing their whispers and seeing their breadcrumb trails. Only then you will be ready to let them unfold their full potential in your programs. Intro music by @halfbyte