CityJS conference 2021 — London, UK
As witnessed by Iwona Izdebska
The kaleidoscopic world of Java Script — enter at your own responsibility. Yes, it is notoriously hard to keep up with the gazillion developments in the realm of JavaScript-powered libraries and frameworks. All the lingo that’s flung from all angles at occasional encounters with JavaScript veterans can make you feel dazed and the joy to understand the discourse and being able to chip in is without bounds when you are a newbie, like myself. Gosh, I’m really trying to become part of this club.
It goes without saying, that it is good to occasionally take a break from the screen and participate in a community event. Even better, if at the same time you can make yourself acquainted with the latest trends in technology. All the cool developments served to you on a plate, with a knock-on effect of having fun and the opportunity to mingle with like-minded enables cross-pollination. That’s a developer’s treat!
So, my heart leaped when through a lucky stars’ alignment, I got to assume the role of a codebar delegate and on the 17th of September, visit the mecca of JavaScript pros, the first live CityJS conference in 2 years! As much as I enjoyed time and distance defying Zoom events, I was really thrilled to challenge my visual cortex and leave my four walls for a Beach bar (sic) in London.
The event itself, rather than your usual conference, was a crossbreed with a party vibe, in officially the coolest conference venue ever. And, let me tell you, we did get to enjoy the best of this year’s summer yet on the riverside in the open air.
I will try my best to give you a quick round-up of the talks albeit through the prism of my rookie’s knowledge.
The fiery-haired Chriss Heilmann gave a preview of the newest developer tools features in chromium-based browsers. You will be delighted to know that now you can update your codebase straight from the developer tools without the need for all that copy-pasting. What’s more, opening a browser tab with developer tools inside VS code and not having to switch between the two is possible. The main take-away point — dev tools are more powerful than you thought.
The charismatic Luca Mezzalira talked us through the hottest trend in frontend architecture. Do you make web applications? Have you ever thought of compartmentalizing your frontend into independent microfrontends, which speeds-up the development, makes debugging easier, optimizes the design, and reduces loading times? Well, think again.
The expressive Cassie Evans tackled the topic of scroll-triggered animations, which can be a real minefield but used correctly can make your website more engaging. She presented good practices of using them with examples and gave practical tips how you can achieve those.
The spirited Sara Vieira showed how to surprise the users and adorn your website with your own (yesss) 3D animations generated in Blender.
Our very own, rainbow-themed Jo Franchetti presented the brainchild of long lockdown days — a multiplayer game to play on-line with your friends. All your nagging questions have been answered. Do I need a server? Will my friends have to install anything? No, peer-to-peer architecture is the secret!
The always-flanked-by-his wife Eddie Jaoude presented his Discord bot that a) was a use case for a NoSQL database and b) among its capabilities boasted detecting linguistic violations of inclusiveness in your discord server (something close to our hearts). And since it’s open source, if you want, you can also contribute to the bot yourself.
The actual female engineer, Kadi Kraman divulged the secrets of off-line capable apps. We can distinguish three levels of off-line functionalities– notifying the user that she is offline (which is still progress), making the previously loaded content accessible, or you can even go as far as enabling mutations on the content and learn all sorts of things that can go wrong with it.
The day culminated in demonstrating that programming and humanities are not actually that far apart. Mynah Marie live-coded her freestyled music performance using Ruby and an actual rockstar developer, Dylan Beattie, showed how he’s created his own programming language called… Rockstar. The language, as the name suggests, makes it possible to create code with an added aesthetic value as it can be read as rock song lyrics (we had the pleasure to participate in a live demo where the code was transduced through Dylan’s vocal cords)
For those craving more, there was an after-party, which yours truly did not attend as she ain’t much of a party girl, but you can ask Jo, I’m sure she can tell you more…
