[aerogear-dev] EmpireJS - day 1

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";