[aerogear-dev] EmpireJS - day 1

[Lucas Holmquist]

Monday and Tuesday i had the pleasure of going to EmpireJS in NYC. It was my first "pure" Javascript conference( previous conf's were a mix of languages ).

Overall it was really cool. Some talks were better than others( as with most conferences ). The videos are also up for on youtube.

I'm going to break this up into 2 emails, one for Day 1 and the other for Day 2

Day 1

Sorting Algorithms in Javascript

by Jenn Schiffer of California Style Sheets Fame

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRyqlhjXYQI

This was actually a pretty cool talk. She went over the fact that ECMAScript doesn't actually have a stable sorting spec.

She went over 3 difference sorting algorithms,

Insertion Sort( stable, small amounts of data ),

Bubble Sort( never use this one ),

Merge Sort( fast and stable, for large data sets - DO NOT USE IN THE BROWSER )

and were to best use them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

awesome visualization of how sorts work

Anatomy of a Successful Module

by Trevor Landau - of isJS fame

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNnRpiHxESc

basically just an overview of how to get your module in the eyes and hands of the people( npm, node/javascript weekly, etc... ), nothing about actually creating a good module.

The Final Frontier

by Domenic Denicola

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzRBgj1AJYA

This was a cool talk, talking about how we need to start thinking about the future and need to "level up" the web.

he went into this like offline, and about the ServiceWorker spec that is being worked on by FF/Chrome

also talked about User Experience and the need for responsiveness and System integration

Also talk about the Developer Experience and how we need better base primitives( webcrypto, promises )

BeagleBone Black: The versatile JS underdog

by Kassandra Perch

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWBaDsmvys

Another cool talk. The BeagleBone Black is hardware, similar to the rasberry pi but has node pre installed and you can ssh into( no need for a separate monitor ).

She talk about how she know nothing about electronics but can still do cool stuff with it. i believe the sdk is a wrapper on top of the johnny-five library

she had a cool demo, showing LED's. it inspired me to buy one after the talk.

Exploiting a Pocket Universe

by Drew Petersen

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1dINlm1W9M

basically talking about games and using web workers to offload some tasks to help with Frames Per Second

The Road to Web Components

by Tom Dale, i think he is one of the guys that wrote Angular

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLyyXHhSl8w

This was a cool talk. He was talking about Web Components and what they are and What they are not.

Basically web components give us the ability to create our own html tags, but shouldn't be used to place the whole application architecture, sort of what polymer might be trying to do.

They are useful because they can be resusable and isolated and could possible help us bridge eco-systems( angular/ember apps )

Went on to show Ember Components - how to use web components today

Backbone.Marionette and RequireJS

by Daniel Cousineau

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K4JKtAGPu4

The no build system build system

by Peter Müller

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gRlmmF4Rc

talking abouthttps://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph

Front-end Style Guides and Greenfields

by Mark Wunsch

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQHAQ_ckrXk

these are my exact notes: "no fucking idea what this talk was suppose to be about"

Gadgets for Holistic Web Detection

by Eric Shepherd

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpqPpbw_gns

talking about the different ways of detections for web apps

resolution detection - bad performance

device detection - difficult across the different stacks

feature detection - sort of good, sort of not

but we need all 3

for resolution we should be designing for the smallest width

and designers should be adding breakpoints in the designs as well as providing templates for all the different sizes

also nesting of CSS is an anti-pattern

Lesser Known Debugging Techniques

by Amjad Masad

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcjUR4icvoQ

kind of a neat talk about the different tips and tricks of debugging JS.

showed a couple of non documented functions in chrome dev tools, like debug() and monitor()

also some cool debugging techniques to set break points in "getters" and "setters" of prototypes

introduced flo, http://facebook.github.io/fb-flo/ , an OSS tools from facebook

Code Memes

by David Byrd

youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajo8ZKsdSLg

basically just talking about how we can write expressions in javascript different ways, and certain ways have become popular. And that you could create your own.

for example,

// Something like this

var name;
if( x ) {
    name = x
} else {
    name = "Bob"
}

// Is written like this

var name = x || "Bob";

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