Highlights from JSHeroes 2018 Conference
On April 19 and 20, we had the pleasure to attend the JSHeroes 2018 conference. It took place in the city of Cluj-Napoca situated in northwestern Romania. It’s also the unofficial capital of the Transylvania region. 🦇
We had a great time there, and in the following read, we’d like to share our highlights with you.
Organization
We’d like to thank the organizers for their great effort in making sure that everything was provided for a wonderful conference experience. The venue was amazing, the main conference hall was accessible, and the presentations were very easy to follow from every single seat. We loved the live drawings during each talk that were aired on one of the screens. 🎨
Our Favorite Talks
In the next lines, we’d like to highlight our favorite talks from the conference and our thoughts on the presented topics.
XSS, CSRF, CSP, JWT, WTF? IDK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dominik Kundel gave us an excellent explanation on the current state of web security. He clarified the meaning of each of these abbreviations. It was a joy to watch Dominik’s performance as he presented this serious topic with a solid dose of humor. It was very interesting to learn more about the Content Security Policy and how we can start using it in our projects. Below is the summary of this great talk.
Fontastic Web Performance
Our next highlight is a talk from Monica Dinculescu on how to use web fonts without affecting our web apps performance. A solid presentation full of great insights. She explained how browsers load web fonts and how we can make this process more efficient. In her talk, Monica includes several great resources that can help us in that context.
What the v…DOM?
Stefan Judis did an amazing job explaining to us how the Virtual Document Object Model works and why there is no “magic” behind it. This was one of the most focused and technical presentations at this conference. He walked us through his own implementation of the Virtual DOM and highlighted the key aspects of the implementation.
Meta Vue Framework
Sébastien Chopin, the co-creator of Nuxt.js gave us a perfect overview of the current state of this great framework. For those of you who are not aware of what Nuxt.js is, it’s a meta Vue framework that gives you a perfect base to create your universal (server-side or client-side rendered) JavaScript application. Sébastien presented to us the latest development of the framework and explained how we can set up our production-ready web apps relatively fast.
Recursion, Iteration, and JavaScript: A Love Story ❤️
One of our favorite talks from the second day was Anjana Vakil’s love story about recursion and iteration in JavaScript. It was an amazing performance by her. She explained to us what proper tail calls are and how we can optimize them. She covered how we can use them to improve the performance of our recursive code. Anjana also went into details of how the iterator and iterations protocols work in JS.
V8 Internals for JS Developers
Mathias Bynens, a V8 Engineer at Google, presented us with a very insightful talk on how we can improve the run-time performance of our JavaScript code with a little bit of JavaScript engine knowledge.
The focus of Mathias’ presentation was on interesting cases where a JavaScript engine can choose to optimize for properties whose names are purely numeric, most specifically array indices. He also explained what PACKED and HOLEY arrays are and gave us a nice set of performance tips like:
⚠️ Avoid elements kind transitions
⚠️ Avoid reading beyond the length of the array
⚠️️ Avoid creating holey arrays
⚠️ Avoid polymorphism
✅ Prefer arrays over array-like objects
Serving for the Win — Deployments and Hosting for the Rest of Us
Ace talk by Phil Hawksworth. His explanation of the website deployment process was probably the most entertaining and simple one we’ve ever heard. Phil presented his talk in a form of three stories from his personal experience.
The focus was on case studies of projects making common mistakes, and some which benefit from a better approach. He shared with us tools and techniques which ease the path to production. Among all insights, he included some eye-opening tips. 😉
CodeSandbox
We’re following closely the development of CodeSandbox — an amazing online code editor. The creator and main contributor to this exciting open source project, Ives van Hoorne, gave us a lovely presentation on how this project started, his experience reaching the current state of the tool, and the upcoming features like live collaboration and optimized dependencies loading.
Final Thoughts
It was an excellent event with a solid speaker lineup. Highly recommend to check the videos and slides from the talks and dive deeper into the presented topics. Enjoy!
