94th Monthly Technical Session
Every month HENNGE hosts technical talks on a range of subjects that our members wish to share with their peers. On May 20th, 2022 we had our 94th session. Unlike most recent sessions, this was a hybrid remote and on-site talk done via Zoom and in the HENNGE offices in Shibuya. For this session, there were five speakers on a varied set of topics.
Introductions
Before moving on to the topics of the night, our MC of the night Jonas introduced new members to the company: Jon Gaul, Yoel Susan, and Arung Agamani. Of these new members, Arung also gave a talk this evening. One additional member was not able to attend this MTS and may be introduced to the group at a later date.
Gender Concepts via the Genderbread Person
The first presentation was given by Miguel. The title was “Genderbread Person: Breaking the big concept of gender down into bite-sized, digestible pieces”. This talk was a quick introduction to the complexity of gender issues and how it can be complicated to quantify a person’s gender given how fuzzy some of the gender boundaries are and how each different type of category functions more like a spectrum than a hard line between two different choices. Miguel spoke about four different ways to quantify gender: Gender Identity, Gender Expression, Sex, and Attraction. Each one of these different dimensions of gender and sexuality was briefly discussed as well as what makes it complicated to quantify any of these dimensions as hard set categories or binary choices.
WebGPU in the Browser
Arung Agamani gave a quick overview on the topic of graphics processing in browsers in his talk “High Performance Computing on Your Very Browser”. In this talk, Arung covered a short overview of the current state of graphics code that can be accessed from the browser as well as the current popular and upcoming API options. The older options of WebAssembly and WebGL were covered for what they can do for developers now and though not fully ready to supplant these WebGPU was covered for what it can do now and will be able to do in the future. Additionally, Arung covered the pitfalls of using GPU-empowered code in the browser such as the increased complexity of multithreaded, multiprocessor code.
React Testing
In the 3rd talk of the evening, Ray Wong gave an introduction to the React Testing Library. This library is useful for testing React style web projects and is not tied to a specific framework. Mocks were covered for their use in intercepting server-side code to better test front-end code. Assert tests run on rendered UI were covered for their usefulness in ensuring that the correct items are appearing on the screen in automated tests. Additionally directly modifying the HTML for the purposes of tests was covered for utility in tests. The one drawback mentioned of this framework is the trouble with Async Assert code being flakey. Asserts failing randomly in UI tests is a common problem in UI testing frameworks.
Treesitter (something, something)
The fourth talk of the night was given by Lukas Reineke. The title of the talk was “Something Something Treesitter”. The topic of the talk was Treesitter, a text parser that can help better represent code in a text editor. Lukas quickly introduced some of the more interesting features of Treesitter: better code highlighting, high speed parsing, ability to create functional items like checklists. The features of Treesitter were then contrasted against more generic parsers as well as slow-working, more accurate parsers that are better for other uses. Finally several of the features were demonstrated live on screen for viewers.
Inside the Black Box
The final talk of the night by Iskandar was titled “Salento Challenge Scorer: Beneath the Black Box”. This talk was designed to demystify the inner workings of the Salento Challenge Scorer app and motivate new developers to take part in its future maintenance and development. The Challenge Scorer exists to enable a quick and sufficiently accuracy grade on submitted code for interview coding challenges. Covered in the talk was the scoring method, how apps are tested as well as some of the special cases and how those cases helped the challenge scorer application evolve. Finally, there was a call out to developers to help support the project in the future.
Wrapping Up
As is normal for these Technical Sessions, a quick call for Lightning talks was given (unprepared talks of 5 minutes or less). On this day there were no submissions so the event ended slightly early. Following this, there was the customary request to participate in the post-talk survey after which the also customary after-talk beer bash began. This session covered a large range of technical tools while also taking time to cover gender issues and so was quite a range of topics. Stay tuned for more interesting talks in the 95th technical session coming up next month!
