List of videos

A few months ago I was invited to give a workshop at Women’s International Leadership Conference on Introduction to Programming. That was an amazing experience that taught me incredible things and motivated me to open source all the steps. Some of the topics I’ll cover on this talk are: - Why Javascript is an appropriate introductory language to programming, versus popular teaching choices such as Python - What is feasible in a short length workshop - How programming workshops empower and inspire learners - How this experience contributed to my own learning, as well as personal and professional growth - The materials to reproduce this workshop Intro music by @halfbyte

Near space is a region of the Earth’s atmosphere starting at 20 km, high enough to boil water at body temperature. With a little bit of preparation, you can launch a ballon carrying a payload of sensors and cameras driven by JavaScript into near space at twice the height that commercial airlines can fly. I will guide you through the hardware, software and red tape you should be familiar with to create your own high altitude experiments. Let’s take back cloud computing! Intro music by @halfbyte

As front-end dev educator, my heart broke every time a student proclaimed “I hate JavaScript.” I’ve found the JavaScript community to be extremely positive and welcoming, but we can do better, especially if our newest colleagues aren’t feeling the love. Let’s talk about barriers to entry for new JS devs, both technical and non-technical, and let’s talk about how we can help alleviate them. Learn how to be supportive and inspiring in your daily work, how to teach and explain JS concepts effectively, and how you, esteemed JS community member, can help end the laments of “I hate JavaScript.” Intro music by @halfbyte

This last May JavaScript turned 20 years old. I want to look at how we are used to code with the current standard (ES5) and how it would be to use JavaScript’s first version in retrospective. We’re going to talk about the path through Mocha, LiveScript, JavaScript, ECMAScript 1, 2,3,5 and the latest ECMAScript 2015 and 2016. Intro music by @halfbyte

If extensive libraries and even the tiniest module followed SemVer strictly, dependency hell would be a thing of the past … but humans weren’t made to follow rules. There are way more than 150.000 packages on npm today – the most of any registry. Using the right packages in your own modules and applications makes JavaScript the joy to develop it is today. But if even immensely popular libraries fail to properly declare breaking changes, how can we trust the over 50.000 strangers who developed all these modules? Currently we can’t. Let me show you how to write confidence-inspiring modules with breaking change detection and fully automated, tested releases including changelogs. Machines do a way better job with this than buggy humans. Intro music by @halfbyte

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. Intro music by @halfbyte

JavaScript that writes JavaScript: Christoph will give an intro to jscodeshift and the underlying tools like recast and ast-types that help rewrite and modernize a lot of Facebook’s JavaScript code day-to-day. We’ll explore why these tools become increasingly important and how they change how we think about open source and breaking API changes at Facebook. At the end of the talk everyone will be able to run their own code transformations across all of their projects safely and efficiently. Intro music by @halfbyte

Reverse engineering of the AirPlay protocol and a complete JavaScript implementation Intro music by @halfbyte

There was a time when data connections like WiFi and Bluetooth didn’t exist, yet people still managed to send information over long distances using clever encodings like Morse Code, sound waves and visual impulses. What can we learn from that? This talk looks at ways to use web platform capabilities, like the Web Audio API, Ambient Light Events and Touch Events, to revisit old data transmission techniques and apply them in new contexts. We’ll use demos to explore ultrasonic networking between air-gapped devices, indoor positioning without GPS and sending data through touch. Finally, we’ll look at the privacy implications these unconventional networking capabilities bring. Intro music by @halfbyte