The conference on JavaScript, Node & Internet of Things gave a chance to discuss problems and ideas with some of the world’s top experts. Finally you could discover the latest technologies and the best practices useful for your daily work.
Day 1
The conference started with the registration and breakfast in the middle of the night (8:30 AM). Fortunately, the coffee helped all of us to wake up and start the day.
The toxic side of free
Remy Sharp shared with all the participants his personal experiences about creating JSBin. This tool, which was initially created to teach others JavaScript, is very popular now. Remy presented the difficulties of developing an open-source project, used by many people. He spoke about many obstacles and issues that could happen when your tool is used incorrectly, basically, other way then it was designed. Finally, Remy showed how huge is the final cost of such initiatives, including spending your own time and money, sacrificing your family and the kids. You can learn more about the dark side of the JSBin in the “Toxic Side of Free” slides.
Progressive Enhancement Strategies
Simon McManus is an enthusiast of progressive enhancement. We have to remember how fast the internet is growing and changing. Users expects not only information, but complex interactions too. Simon believes in the importance of progressive enhancement. That is why he demonstrated processes, techniques and architectures which provide the benefits without introducing an overhead. Check his presentation about “Progressive Enhancement Strategies“.
Performance Testing Crash Course
The performance of your application is not only a feature nowadays. It affects your business more than you might think. Dustin Whittle explained the impact of performance on user experience and company revenue. Dustin showed us how to measure scalability on the server-side and the client-side with tools like Siege, Locust.io, Bees with Machine Guns, Google PageSpeed, WBench, and more. The presentation taught us how to automate performance and load testing, and finally evaluate the impact it has on performance and your business. Check out the slides here.
Day 2
Chrome DevTools Deep-dive
Addy Osmani is a very talented developer. As Chrome team member at Google he knows exactly how to measure performance, test features, and check webpage usability with Chrome DevTools. This very powerful tool offers many new features with every update. Addy explained the new functions in performance profiling, JavaScript debugging and animation inspection. If you are interested in productivity, speed, and precision when developing, debugging, and improving your web applications his slides are all you’d like. Check out Dive deep into Chrome DevTools with Addy Osmani.
Building applications in ES6 today
ECMAScript 6 is the future standard of JavaScript syntax and applications. Jack Franklin shared with the audience how to architect and write complex client side JavaScript applications in ES 6 today, despite lack of implementations across browsers. Developers can now write code using new ES6 features like constants, arrow functions, classes and more. Watch video about building applications in ES6 today.
TypeScript – your regular JavaScript on steroids
Every developer heard about good and bad sides of Java Script. If you wish to take advantage of modern development principles such as static typing, classes, modules, and interfaces in order to build robust and reusable code, then TypeScript could be the right answer to your expectations. Christos Matskas showed how to leverage TypeScript powerful features to develop scalable, modular and powerful code. Check his introduction to TypeScript.
Surviving Micro-services
“Microservices” has been the most popular buzz-word for the last years. Unfortunately, moving from monoliths to microservice architecture isn’t always the best solution. Richard Rodger talked about idempotency, unreached services and different catastrophic failures. The network is unreliable, and with many moving parts of your application, you can easily hit the wall.
In this talk the presenter made a careful analysis of many byzantine ways in which message-oriented systems can fail. A set of remedial approaches was presented, and an empirical report on there effectiveness was also made. This talk provided with some practical tactics to keep the microservice architectures healthy and performant. You will find Richard’s slides about microservices on slideshare.
Day 3
Ember: Building Production-Grade Web Apps Fast
Yehuda Katz showed how to build a web app fast using Ember. You can start with static html files, combine model data with templates, and finish with deployment on production. Ember was presented as a framework for creating ambitious web applications. It is very professional, well-documented and strongly supported by its community. Check building Production-Grade Web Apps Fast with Ember video from Fullstack 2015 Conference.
API Blueprint for API Design Lifecycle
APIs have been one of the most popular components in web development for the last years. Unfortunately, this fact is often ignored or forgotten. Very often as a result we get a very good implemented software, which is completely useless for clients. Vincenzo Chianese explained how important is the collaboration between API’s developers and customers. This talk showed how to avoid waterfalls by employing iterations, prototyping, communication with client developers, and testing using API Blueprint, an opensource markdown-based WebApi language designed for humans and understandable by machines. Watch video how to satisfy developers and consumers with API
Summary
Fullstack 2015 Conference in London was a very interesting event for developers. You could learn about JavaScript, Node and Internet of Things. The presenters were very professional. The attendees, who came from Google, Heroku, and other big companies, were asking questions and discussed in the lobbies.
Skills Matter organized a very good event. All elements were perfectly coordinated. I recommend this event to all developers, because skills matter.