Texas JavaScript 2015
Last week I was lucky enough to have a great JavaScript conference in my backyard. Another edition of Texas JavaScript (TXJS) was held in downtown Austin on Friday, July 24th.
I wanted to share some thoughts and notes from the talks.
The Scary Stuff
- Check out Simon Swain’s Cold War! Do it now, it’s incredible
- Yan told us about Let’s Encrypt, a new, free, automated, and open Certificate Authority
- Jed’s talk on inline styles was thought provoking and very entertaining. Oh, he was defending them for what it’s worth.
UX & Performance
These talks were great, they all focused on people, not developers. It’s great to be reminded that what we do as developers is pointless if there’s nobody using what we build.
- Michelle talked about building component libraries to be able to give users a consistent and comfortable feel (and providing that value faster)
- Andy discussed the benefits and value of delivering faster web experiences with HTTP/2.
- Alice showed us the troubles and successes of making web sites usable. And not just “nice”, but actually usable for all types of users from any background imaginable. Not everybody uses the web like you and I.
Framework Unshootout
Brian, Tom, and Pete got together back to back to back, and talked about how the Angular, Ember, and React teams are all actually on the same team (more or less). They’ve all stolen borrowed ideas from each other, and they’re all moving forward together, not in spite of one another.
The Once & Future Web
Future! Here we got schooled on how to use some new toys. Rushaine talked ES6, Mat “Wilto” convinced me that images are ruining the web and need to be fixed, and Jake told us, among many other progressive enhancements, how a network connection is something to be considered as a feature you might not have when building web apps.
Expand Your Mind
Our minds were expanded and partially blown by Jenna explaining the similarities between JavaScript and our brains’ language processing. If that was enough to melt your mind, David showed us the awesome ClojureScript compiler (I have a lot to learn here). Finally, Jenn schooled and entertained us with arrays. Trust me, it was great!
Awards
- Best phone call: Alex & Pizza Delivery
- Best wardrobe change under pressure: Alice Bartlett
- Best Game: Cold War
- Best Slide Images: Jenna for Adventure Time
- Best JavaScript Conference in Austin: All the organizers and speakers, great job!
You can find the full stream of the event on YouTube
Photo credit @jaffathecake