Week 25: Node+JS Interactive 2019
Dec 9 - 13, 2019
This week has very much been a build week, starting to build the foundation for a new prototype around “No Booking Tool”. For Monday and Tuesday I kept my head down, coding and coding.
I was lucky enough to score a ticket to Node + JS Interactive in Montreal, so on Tuesday night I jumped on the train and headed up to Quebec to see what’s new in JavaScript this month.
Open JS Foundation provides a neutral home for open source JavaScript projects supported by companies as big as Google and Microsoft. This week they’re putting on a conference in Montreal, so it was time to get nerdy amongst other developers and learn some new things!
On Wednesday morning OpenJS Foundation presented some updates, including the use of Node.js in space (accompanied by some nervous laughter from the audience), new Node Certifications and the announcement that they’re taking on the excellent desktop app framework, Electron, which is the framework behind Slack and Visual Studio Code.
The highlight of the morning though was the conference’s first live coder and advocate for women in tech, Ellie Galloway. Ellie demonstrated Jewelbots’ codeable wearables, which were created to get kids interested in coding and STEM topics. I personally can’t wait to experiment with my MXChip from Microsoft!
I attended some great talks learning about efficient streams and worker threads by Liz Parody, as well as a talk by Microsoft on how to run my own dev box in the cloud with Visual Studio Code, which even allows you to share screens and pair program together!
A talk on UX by Maurice Hayward really drove home a lot of what I’ve learnt during the fellowship. He talked about accessibility, and how if we make software accessible, we’re making it better for everyone. With an audience of developers, he showed us that as developers, we’re making decisions that impact UX.
At this point it was time to take a break from the conference and connect with the rest of the fellows on our cohort wide call.
David Horvath from HackerOne talked about security vulnerabilities and gave some data-based insights on current security vulnerabilities. The OWASP Top 10 famously lists the top 10 security concerns in software, however David pointed out concerns vary greatly, depending on their discoverability and the skill of the hacker.
Next up I made my first VS Code extension, making a function that re-factored a JavaScript function by interacting with it using the Abstract String Tree, a way of manipulating the syntactic structure of code. These types of extensions are great for linting code as well as being able to detect when code is invalid before you even run it.
At development conferences, booth crawls are always a lot of fun (+ there’s always a lot of swag up for grabs!). Google, Microsoft and Heroku were all there to talk about their cloud services. Working with these platforms is one of those necessities of being a developer. I always enjoy talking to technical staff at these events and always come away with new knowledge that will make my life easier.
Thursday was mostly about the geekier topics, some of which I understand, some of which I’ll leave to the maintainers of Node.
Marian Villa, CEO of Pionerasdev spoke about how her not-for-profit organization helps Colombian women learn to code in a safe space. It was inspiring to see it has grown from something small, a few people getting together to code, to something that will impact peoples lives and careers.
A refresher on Electron by Felix Rieseberg from Slack was a highlight. For me it’s something I tried towards the beginning of my career as a dev, and at that time it was quite new, but Electron has matured and has gained quite a following. Unlocking the world of desktop apps for web developers, Electron allows us to build cross-platform desktop apps with Javascript, HTML and CSS. I’m looking forward to finding an application to try this one out!
Ayesha Mazumdar from Optimizely gave a great talk about scaling accessibility. She provided examples of common pitfalls with accessibility, many of which I’ve been guilty, and provided constructive ways to prevent the gotcha using component libraries.
Alessandro Segala introduced us to the world of the Inter-Planetary File System. No, it’s not just a concept, it really works! It’s a way to serve files and, as he demonstrated, static web apps on a distributed network.
Mixing cats and code seems to come naturally for programmers. Constanza Yáñez Calderón presented her solution to getting home late to upset cats. She made a cat feeder, based on node-cron running on a Raspberry Pi. It was great to see her project progress, and the mishaps she encountered with cron that gave her (very happy) cats new food every hour instead of every day!
As a developer, you tend to spend a lot of time in the command line. Ruy Adorno from npm showed us his favourite command line tricks to help workflows and add interactivity to the terminal, making things like switching git branches or selecting folders a lot easier. My favourite quote from Ruy was “The command line is an amazing user interface” - I agree!
Kadir Topal talked about the Top 10 Frustrations for designers and developers. #1 is having to support specific browsers (IE11 anyone?) and in the top five, we blame four of those things on browsers!
Then that was the end! Node + JS Interactive was over. Next time I’d love to see more front-end content, and with Electron now in the mix, I’m sure the next event in Austin in June 2020 will have a full-stack lineup of interesting talks.