Review of JSHeroes 2018 edition
With an awesome venue and a nice community vibe, JSHeroes took place this year in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
The Grand Hotel Italia was the place to gather a large number of attendees. The building has a classic vibe and it’s a little apart from the center of the city, which gives a relaxed and cozy atmosphere to the event.
The topics of the talk were varied though, of course, with a focus on the current and future scene of front-end development.
This selection is personal and curated, based on my previous knowledge and topics of interest. Go to JSHeroes’ YouTube channel, it had videos of the all talks so you might find some that fit your interests.
Highlighted talks
Sketching in the Browser by Mark Dalgleish
Mark did a superdetailed explanation about using React-rendered components in Sketch through symbols, all the tooling involved in the process, and the benefits of consuming the design system as a style guide from a single source of truth.
Because of limitations and heavy setup to get html-skecthapp working, he developed html-sketchapp-cli for easier scaffolding.
You can learn more about Mark’s work here:
XSS, CSRF, CSP, JWT, WTF? IDK by Dominik Kundel
In general, we developers don’t put much action on top of security measures in our projects. Domenic gave us. helpful recommendations to prevent security issues in web applications, for instance:
- HTTPS all the things
- Use HttpOnly for cookies
- JWT tokens are not a magical solution
- Use noopener and noreferal on external links
- Use Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF tokens)
- Blocking XSS attacks is not that easy
- JSONP is not bulletproof at all
- Use Content Security Pilicy (CSP) headers as a safe net, not as your security approach
A truly insightful talk with practical examples for each item in the list. You can find Dominic Kundel on Twitter.
Fontastic Web Performance by Monica Dinculescu
I’m a real geek around web-font performance, and though I knew already most of the recommendations from Monica it was an engaging and fun talk. This is a must watch for a front-end developer today to be aware of how loading custom fonts can impact negatively user experience on slow connections.
Learn more here:
The exciting future of React by Kristijan Ristovski (Kitze)
Kitze did a fantastic job entertaining the crowd and keeping it fun while covering what’s new on React 16 release, like Fragments, componentDidCatch, Portals, and the call-return experimental API.
V8 internals for JS developers by Mathias Bynens
Awesomel talk about how V8 optimizes and deoptimizes your code as content and types inside an array changes. I ended up with a better understanding on how browser engines handle data structures under the hood.
How to make your LEDs better listeners by Stephanie Nemeth
This talk was a wonderful showcase of a side project combining both web and hardware standards. Stephanie used MMQT low energy transmission protocol to connect Arduino and web sockets with LED lights.
Half-way through the talk, she shared a web application so all the crowd could change live the lights and patterns to an umbrella and the jewelry she was wearing. Mind blowing.
Other talks
- Sara Vieira gave a talk about style guide based development, and explaining how react-styleguidist and storybook can fit your needs.
- Sarah Drasner showed us how to combine Microsoft Azure serverless functions, Vue, and SVG animations to build a cart checkout.
- Phil Hawksworth showcased Netlify goods and shared old experiences on continuous deployments in an entertaining talk.
- stefan judis from Contentful, went deep into the internals of modern UI libraries and explained how vDOM algorithms work.
Check out this and the rest of the talks in the conference’s YouTube channel.
It’s fair to say the organizers nailed a lot of points that most conferences usually miss. The event had an awesome catering, a super comfortable venue, and the right amount of people, which makes engaging with other developers easier and speakers more approachable in common areas.
At the end of the 2018 edition, the organizers emphasized how important is to build inclusive and community-driven events, and it’s good to see a conference not just saying it but also taking actions: they offer diversity tickets, support open source projects, and provide a transparency report about where the money goes and why.
Next year edition is around the corner and Simona Cotin, Cloud Developer Advocate from Microsoft, has already been announced as a speaker. Definitely a must in my conference calendar for 2019, hope to see you there!
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