JSConf 2019

JSConf Colombia 2019, October 18 and 19 at Medellín, Colombia. I was a speaker there for the first time. Here is a brief summary from the talks I was able to check out, based on my live-tweeting. The full talks will soon be available at JSConf youtube channel.

Day 1

First off, the opening live coding show by algo0ritmos, led by Celeste Betancur. An electronic music and video visualization show where 3 coders connected to a server to manipulate different aspects of the audio and video in realtime.

Constanza Yáñez, from Argentina, opened the talks sharing and live testing her implementation of an automatic cat feeder using JavaScript and a Raspberry Pi, and how it made one of her childhood dreams become a reality.

Sergio Quintero, a local, discussed skimming data hacking via malicious scripts injected into legitimate websites to steal information, and how it can be prevented by intercepting XHR calls using a client-side firewall.

Luis Alejandro Vega, from New York, shared his experience building a career at Bloomberg, as well as how adding “pet characters” to the in-house projects helped increase the ownership of the team over them as well as the visibility for other departments of the company.

Mayra Rodriguez, from Bogotá, discussed the reactive app architecture and shared some tips to achieve good performance in your web app using RXJS stores.

Irina Shestak, from Germany, shared her experiences with Rust and WASM, with lots of tips to make coding, debugging and deploying easier, which she learned thru her quest of learning on the go.

Melina Mejía, a local, spoke about web accessibility being critical to reaching all audiences, and how to implement an accessible interface using ARIA.

Santiago Zapata, a local, did an amazing talk about procedural generation, including an introduction to it, where it can be useful, and a break down of his procedural castle generator.

Missed talk by Anton McConville, from Canada. “Personality hacking: using Node, WebAudio and Houdini to visualize psychology of song lyrics“:(

Vanessa Marely, a local,  talked about the power of storytelling as a way to better communicate ideas, and gave some tips for good, effective storytelling.

Lucas Aragno, from Argentina, shared some of his knowledge on Neural Networks and using JavaScript libraries like Tensorflow.JS and SynapticJS to implement them.

Jennifer Wong, from California, discussed the weirdness of time handling in JavaScript, how the Date object and MomentJS came to be and when to use one or the other.

Day 2

Missed talk from Kate Beard, from England, “Learn How to Play the Theremin* Today, Guaranteed!” 😦

Missed talk from Alejandro Oviedo, from Argentina, “A codex for the web” 😦

Maris Botero, a local, gave a very colorful explanation of machine learning, neural networks and her project, The Time Machine, and how Javascript, tensorflow and the ml5 library made it possible. Awesome transformation of old pics into colorful child drawings

Adrian Bolonio, from Austria, dug deeper into the issue of web accessibility, focusing on the tools to test it over different aspects of a webapp (code, DOM and final appearance in the browser), including simulating visual impairments of different degrees with NoCoffee.

Jerome Hardaway, from Tennesee, talked about how to make it easier for people to jump into existing software projects. Remove ego from your code, code for the others. Design the onboarding process seriously around building the confidence of new team members. Document and refactor.

Daniel Rico, a local, briefed on how container-baser deployment enables horizontal auto-scaling, and shared the results of his experiments to find degradation points in NodeJS vs Tomcat, which can help finding out the number of nodejs instances required for your app.

The experts’ panel had Alejandro Oviedo, Santiago Zapata, Celeste Betancur, and Vanessa Amarely discussed different aspects of the present and future of JavaScript, their frustrations with development, and what features of the language have affected their individual fields the most (Backend, Game Development, Live Coding and Frontend Development, respectively). It was moderated by Juliana Gomez, co-organizer of the event, (Picture by co_constanza)

Colin Ihrig, from Pennsylvania, gave a very useful walkthru of some diagnostics and debugging tools included in nodejs out of the box, when and how to use them.

Jessica Lord, from New York, shared the history of Electron: going beyond Atom, avoiding a scaffolding approach ala rails, the importance of clear and maintainable docs and building a community around the new tech. Developer Experience is critical for a successful tech tool!

Missed talk by Luis Villalobos, a local, “Desarrollo de interfaces modernas de usuario usando un “viejo” modelo matemático computacional” 😦

Bryan Hughes, from California, believes programming can create art just as any other technology (such as watercolor or oil paint) can. It’s all in the intent of whoever is using the tech: is it to convey emotions or facts? Finding your style is a mix of chance and determination

Finally, Eva Ferreira, from Argentina, went into a trip 10 years back to the past on web development, how things have changed for good and the history behind these improvements. But also how some things have gone amiss… abuse of push notifications, privacy breaches, popup madness, websites heavier than needed, lack of accessibility, fatigue for new frameworks… where are we heading to, can we do things better?