Things I learned at JSConf.eu 2015
A backend engineer pretending to fit in with the JS community.
tl;dr: JavaScript is pretty cool once you accept and embrace its quirks. The community around it is even better. There are some fucking smart people working on really cool shit.
Introduction
First off, let me start by saying that this was my first conference ever, and also that I am not actually a front-end JavaScript developer. Day to day, I spend my time building back-end micro-services in GO for Betable, an online gambling platform. I only dabble in JavaScript when I need to work on our externally facing API, which is written in Node.js. Needless to say, I was a little intimidated going to an all-JavaScript conference where every single person there was probably a much better JavaScript developer than I currently am.
Luckily, it all went much better than I expected. I learned a ton from the amazing talks I saw (more on that a bit later) and met some really cool people: the organizers (@theophani, @hblank, @janl), the speakers (@razvancaliman, @whitneyhacks) and the attendees (too many to call out, sorry!). I also really enjoyed exploring Berlin — one of my favorite cities in my home country — with my friend from undergrad and fellow engineer @tdeekens.
Schedule
I flew into Frankfurt a few days early to visit my family and then blasted up the Autobahn on Thursday afternoon to get a good night of sleep before heading over to Radialsystem V at 9am for breakfast and mingling. The opening by the curators blew everyone away (or so it appeared) and landed some serious applause. It was a sweet light show and a fun mashup music performance of samples from previous talks at JSConf by @thedeftone, @kahliltweets and @bonotes. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/lJ1kY-CSpBk
Talk slots were about 30 minutes and there was a coffee or food break after each block of three talks which made things very easy to follow without being overwhelmed with information. I did get a small hint of being back in school every now and then but unlike how I remember school, none of the talks at this conference disappointed or made me fall asleep. Every single one was interesting and engaging.
In broad terms they all centered around:
- community and the people that write code
- performance and how to write code correctly
- cool shit and how to push the cutting edge
The breaks were filled with coffee by “The Barn,” arguably one of the best coffees in Berlin; ClubMate, a caffeine drink apparently very popular in Germany that I had never heard of before and fantastic food by a catering company that I didn’t get the name of but it was way better than I would have expected from such a large event.
Friday concluded with a party open to all JS conference attendees that weekend (RejectJS, JSConf, CSSConf) and plus-ones. @usefulthink kicked it off with a demo in which he used JavaScript and CSS to showcase a light cube he built himself, as well as taking control of the room’s lighting systems and making it go crazy. Needless to say, the crowd went wild. For the rest of the night the Red Bull DJ Champion of 2014 spun the decks in impressive fashion and played a really fun set.
Saturday was a gap day on which CSSConf happened and I took the time to explore Berlin, which was a nice change of pace in between two full days of talks.
Sunday was much like Friday, except with a venue change for the closing party. We took over a small “club” on board of the Hoppetosse with open bar until the money ran out. You can imagine how that went.
Talks
Let’s go into a bit more detail on the talks. As I said earlier, they were all great but I am going to pick a few of them out that I liked in particular.
Day 1
Sam Richard from the IBM Watson project demonstrated a bunch of cool APIs that IBM recently made publicly available for processing human natural language (like speech). He put together a live speech-to-speech babelfish-like (hello Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans) translator as well as a GitHub commit tone extension that disables the “Submit” button if you’re using negative language in your commit. Interestingly, this was not the only talk on speech processing but I liked it the best.
(Dependency Hell Just Froze Over)
I completely missed this talk but it turned out to be all-the-hype that weekend so it deserves a mention here. If you are struggling with dependency version control in your JavaScript applications, go check out greenkeeper.io by Stephan Bönnemann.
Illusion of Time. When 60 seconds is not 1 minute.
Denys Mishunov took us on a tour of user deception. People absolutely HATE passive wait time aka waiting for something without anything else to do. How does this help us as developers? Build websites that deceive the user by showing something very quickly and doing the heavy processing in the background while the user is distracted. For example amazon.com takes 7 seconds to fully load! But we don’t care because we see it and interact with it much earlier.
I came into this talk thinking: Hey, maybe someone will explain to me how to write JavaScript the right way. Aaaaaand was immediately disappointed when Dmitry Baranoskiy said that he didn’t know either. However, he pointed out a lot of fun quirks of JavaScript and concluded that we all just need to start accepting and embracing how JavaScript works instead of hating on it. For example .charAt() will give you a result no matter what it is called on or what it is passed. Strings, numbers, objects, undefined. Anything. Point taken.
The year of the peer-to-peer web
Thomas Gorissen took the stage, put on a black turtleneck sweater and proceeded to pitch P2P in a manner similar to the former head of a weird fruit company (Forrest Gump, anyone?). Why is this the year of peer-to-peer web? Because it is seriously one of the coolest things I’ve seen. WebRTC is an open web standard to enable real-time communication and P2P is by the default of IP the shortest connection between two computers, which means sending audio or video that route can’t get any more performant. He demoed a webpage that enabled videocalling between multiple people with a one-line embedded script tag. Gone are the days of Skype and Google Hangouts if you can just do that in your web apps! Check out skylink.io and webtorrent.io for demos and more information.
Day 2
If Walter Gropius was a JavaScripter
Whitney Williams, who I had met the day before over coffee, talked about the history of the Bauhaus, an art school that operated in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s and fostered the connection of manufacturing with design. Her point was that we should inspire more collaboration between developers and designers and stop separating the two.
Evolving Complex Systems Incrementally
Christoph Pojer from Facebook demonstrated an impressive AST-based tool that helps them refactor massive amounts of code in seconds. It is called JScodeshift and is now an open-source project! Codemod tools give anyone the ability to align certain coding patterns over entire code bases without having to edit potentially thousands of files manually.
Thomas Watson was visibly nervous because he had worked on his demos until 3am the night before. He started off with a theory lesson on how AirPlay works and broke it down as essentially being multicast DNS plus some fancy encryption. As usual, Apple just took existing technology, put a little twist on it to confuse everyone and is selling it as innovative and amazing. Luckily, there are people like Thomas out there that put a lot of effort into reverse-engineering this stuff and then giving us open-source tools to use that technology. You can even use it to live stream audio over torrents with peervision.
Razvan Caliman, another speaker that I had met on Friday, demonstrated some alternative methods of communication. Have you ever tried to transmit data using supersonic sound or via ambient light sensors? No? Well he built demos for both an more. Apparently this technology already exists to track movement through stores with visual light communication. Really impressive stuff and interesting alternative ideas. Supposedly you can even infect the BIOS with viruses just by sending sound waves that get picked up by your sound card …
Applying 3D Engineering Drawing Techniques To Web App Diagrams
Here is a new concept: Ever get tired of navigating your codebase and trying to keep the entire folder and file structure in your head until somebody comes and distracts you and that carefully crafted model in your head just shatters? Ola Adedoyin might have a solution for you by creating 3D models of your codebase. The idea sounds awesome and very promising but unfortunately there are hardly any tools available for this now. It’s something to watch for the future though!
There were of course many more talks that were technically interesting, thought provoking and mentally stimulating but sadly I can not call out all of them.
Conclusion
JSConf.eu was my first conference and I could not have asked for a better experience. By the end of it I was left with a ton of new ideas to bring back to our engineering team and with an overwhelming sense of wanting to be part of this community of awesome people. I am very thankful for the opportunity that @betable and especially our new VP of engineering, @admc, gave me and I hope to see everyone again next year!
