The frontend is where customers are. That’s why the frontend is the most important part of the application for frequent change and learning. As the software industry grasps this, we’re placing more emphasis on strong tools for development for the browser. This track covers some of these, emphasizing how JavaScript languages and ecosystems are stronger, in speed of both creation and staying readable under frequent change. From types to tests and dependency management, the serious development is in the front end.
Track: JavaScript & Web Tech
Location: Seacliff ABC
Day of week: Monday
![](../sites/default/files/styles/track_host/public/nehab375b.jpg?itok=KLWt3UWj)
Track Host: Neha Batra
Neha Batra is an engineering manager at GitHub who, 6 years ago, was an energy consultant and quit to teach herself programming because “it was time". She holds a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and enjoys foodie adventures, planning trips (and has gdocs for most of her trip plans), and collecting national park magnets. If you want to hear her ramble on a topic, ask her about pair programming, how she likes managing, or how much she misses Miami.
11:50am - 12:40pm
npm and the Future of JavaScript
npm has more than 10 million users, and they download 7 billion packages a week. We also ran a direct survey of 16,000 JavaScript devs this year. That gives us more data about what JavaScript users are doing and where the community is going than anybody else. Let us tell you about yourselves, without bias, without trying to sell you on something. This talk is about what tools you use, what the community believes best practices really are, what frameworks are on the rise and which are on the wane, and where the major pain points are for devs right now. Let us help you plan your technical choices in 2019.
1:40pm - 2:30pm
RxJS: A Better Way to Write Frontend Applications
Everything that happens in a frontend application is asynchronous; events happen - a user types something, a server responds with data - and our programs react. The traditional approach to this problem is to deal with asynchronous "parts" of your application in callbacks or promises, while working with static data structures and behaving as if the rest of the program were synchronous. After years of writing frontend apps, I still find this confusing and cumbersome. But what if we stopped trying to hide what is asynchronous and accepted that none of our data is static? This is the premise of functional reactive programming. We treat data itself as asynchronous - as streams which represent a snapshot a given value over time, and operations that can transform those values. Functional reactive programming is a major conceptual shift but one that can vastly simply frontend programming. You can use it regardless of what platform, or in the case of the web, what javascript MVC you rely on. It's an amazing technique that is the core of my toolbox in writing frontend apps. I want to help demystify it for you, and show you how you can use FRP today!
2:55pm - 3:45pm
Learning to Love Type Systems
Sometimes, undefined is not a function. As mortal programmers, we ship bugs to production everyday. Bugs slow us down, frustrate our users, and cause us to have crises of confidence. Don't go alone–type systems in TypeScript, Flow, and GraphQL can improve your confidence and help you ship less bugs. We'll start with why: a practical look at what you'll get from embracing types. Then, a gentle introduction to the ideas behind them. Finally, we'll explore the possibilities of a type system over the network.
4:10pm - 5:00pm
Fantastic Frontend Performance Tricks & Why We Do Them
The internet was invented in a time that no expected we’d be making amazingly complex applications. So how do we deliver these applications quickly and reliably and provide our users with a good experience? Why do we even have to go through all this trouble? This talk will cover the state of the art in front-end performance optimizations— from minimizing file size to preventing thrashing— digging into the way the internet and browsers work to explain why each of these practices is important.
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Desktop Applications in Electron: Pro Tips And Tricks
Electron is an awesome new framework from the folks at GitHub for writing Desktop Applications using Web Technologies, that many successful companies such as Microsoft, Slack, Facebook, and others have used in order to ship great experiences to their users. In this session, learn some common pitfalls that many developers new to Electron fall into, especially for people with a web background who are new to Desktop development, as well as learn some great new Tricks and libraries that you can use to make great app experiences for your users.
Tracks
Monday, 5 November
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Microservices / Serverless Patterns & Practices
Evolving, observing, persisting, and building modern microservices
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Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking
Practical approaches using DevOps & Lean Thinking
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JavaScript & Web Tech
Beyond JavaScript in the Browser. Exploring WebAssembly, Electron, & Modern Frameworks
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Modern CS in the Real World
Thoughts pushing software forward, including consensus, CRDT's, formal methods, & probabilistic programming
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Modern Operating Systems
Applied, practical, & real-world deep-dive into industry adoption of OS, containers and virtualization, including Linux on Windows, LinuxKit, and Unikernels
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Optimizing You: Human Skills for Individuals
Better teams start with a better self. Learn practical skills for IC
Tuesday, 6 November
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Next-gen architectures from the most admired companies in software, such as Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, & more
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21st Century Languages
Lessons learned from languages like Rust, Go-lang, Swift, Kotlin, and more.
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Emerging Trends in Data Engineering
Showcasing DataEng tech and highlighting the strengths of each in real-world applications.
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Bare Knuckle Performance
Killing latency and getting the most out of your hardware
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Socially Conscious Software
Building socially responsible software that protects users privacy & safety
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Delivering on the Promise of Containers
Runtime containers, libraries, and services that power microservices
Wednesday, 7 November
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Applied AI & Machine Learning
Applied machine learning lessons for SWEs, including tech around TensorFlow, TPUs, Keras, PyTorch, & more
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Production Readiness: Building Resilient Systems
More than just building software, building deployable production ready software
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Developer Experience: Level up your Engineering Effectiveness
Improving the end to end developer experience - design, dev, test, deploy, operate/understand.
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Security: Lessons Attacking & Defending
Security from the defender's AND the attacker's point of view
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Future of Human Computer Interaction
IoT, voice, mobile: Interfaces pushing the boundary of what we consider to be the interface
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Enterprise Languages
Workhorse languages found in modern enterprises. Expect Java, .NET, & Node in this track