Thunder Plains

This summer I will be completing a fellowship with Mozilla helping building out the documentation for WebGL on MDN.
At Thunderplains I would love to speak about this experience, and what the future of WebGL looks like. WebGL is a fairly low-level API that has a lot of power and archane complexity. Most of the knowledge-base for GL-related technologies is written towards developers of non-web technologies. I would like to boil this technology down into a simple conceptual intro of the lower-level API that is specifically targeted towards web developers. I would also like to challenge the attendees on what future applications can be built using WebGL and how it will fundamentally change how we interact with the web.

Almost every Javascript developer starts with an example of a REST server to create requests and fulfill their network transport. I'm going to talk about building a TCP network layer which will handle requests between different Node.JS applications which can be spread across the globe.
Today I'm the lead developer at NodeCraft, where we process between 50-70 million requests a week via TCP and REST. I'll talk about the alternative services which provide this today, how to design a scale-able transport layer, and even how to bring the data to the browser via Socket.IO
I personally believe that Javascript and Node.JS is so much more than just a REST framework or a web server. I want to show you how!

Many of us depend on the internet for both work and play, but it's possible to go about our lives without knowing the steps it takes to get those pixels to show up and delight us and our users.
However, a sense of the process of what's going on to serve web apps can help us as developers make better software as well as understand the motivation behind many of the optimizations that we've been taught. This talk will cover the life of a web request in a browser, from entering the URL to the processing the HTML, covering DNS, TLS, TCP, HTTP, and HTML parsing and rendering, explaining how each step in the process affects the performance of web apps.

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity created by Rob Eisenberg, creator of Durandal, who left Angular 2 team to create cleaner and simpler JavaScript framework of tomorrow written in ECMAScript 7!

The Product Design Sprint was started by Google Ventures and quickly adopted and updated by several of the biggest names in the industry, including thoughtbot.
I'll talk about how we do a sprint, things that we have learned, and what you can do to put these ideas into practice. Design Sprints are perfect for startups wanting to realize their ideas, but also work well for that new feature for your existing product or anywhere that needs some critical thinking and validation from real users. We will outline what is done on each day of the typical week, and how it can be scaled up or even scaled down to a few hours. I'll also share thoughtbot's resources to give them everything they need to start doing design sprints of their own.

In this interactive tutorial you will build the popular game Tetris using React, ImmutableJS and Flux architecture.
Learn how one-way data flow and a reactive render framework like React make game development a breeze!

Let's face it: you have a web application that's got a ton of JavaScript. You probably have jQuery. Everything is unstable. You're being asked to do things that will make it worse. You're thinking "I should XYZ framework," but how do you integrate that with your current app without rewriting the WHOLE THING!?

In this talk we'll look at:
1. Three web applications faced with the need to rewrite their application
2. Architecture, problems, and needs of each application
3. How each app rewrite was approached, what went well, what didn't
4. How you can reach they same success they all eventually reached through incremental improvement

Near space is a region of the Earth's atmosphere starting at 20 km, high enough to boil water at body temperature. With a little bit of preparation, you can launch a ballon carrying a payload of sensors and cameras driven by JavaScript into near space at twice the height that commercial airlines can fly. I will guide you through the hardware, software and red tape you should be familiar with to create your own high altitude experiments.
I will guide you through the entire journey starting at ground level from legal restrictions and licensing issues to building custom hardware and writing code for harvesting data from (an actual) cloud, to tracking and safely recovering your payload as it fall back to Earth. Our project began as a 2 day hackathon at work with a GoPro and GPS unit in a cardboard box and grew into it's current level of complexity and fun through many weekends of hacking, robotics, amateur radio and very amateur aeronautics.
Let's take back cloud computing!

This isn't your run of the mill performance talk.
In this talk I'll explain some of the cooler and more unique performance techniques I've learned while developing Lodash v4.

The more scope is creeped the more un-readable and un-maintainable a codebase becomes.
I want to go through some of the tough decisions that have been made to abandon current development and shake the big etch a sketch until it's just a blank slate.
This can't be done haphazardly nor should it be done to allow your team to try out the newest framework. But you need not be afraid to learn from your past mistakes and create a better application for your company or client.

Have you heard of TypeScript? CoffeeScript? Dart? Have you ever wanted to invent your own programming language and run it in the browser? Well, you can! Write your own compiler! Or a transpiler, or whatever the cool kids are calling them these days. No formal knowledge of compilers is required.
In this talk, I'll show you how to use tools like Jison to build a compiler that targets JavaScript as a runtime. You can even generate Source Maps, so you can debug against your original code in the browser.
We'll then put it to use by writing a compiler for the greatest programming language of all time: ArnoldC.

As non-native English speaker, I am constantly struggling to "read the document" in English. I get frustrated for not being able to "read between lines" of Github comments. I get embarrassed when I don't get sarcasm on slack chat. Typo in variable name is the story of my life.
The Tech industry is undeniably Anglocentric. The de-facto language used to develop, document, and market software is English, and It is often overlooked that software is used largely by non-English speaking communities.
As someone who speaks English as a second language, it's mostly confusing and sometime very frustrating to navigate through this tech scene. I want to make it better by shearing my experience. Let's pause for a moment talking about libraries and syntax, and look at the experience of a silent majority.

jQuery is a JavaScript library many web developers utilize for writing concise and powerful browser code, as well as abstracting away browser differences and deficiencies. While jQuery may become less relevant over time as modern browsers are more widely adopted, it is a real and present part of modern web development today. What jQuery does not provide is any built-in programmatic structure. And, applications without consistent structure can quickly become unmaintainable spaghetti code.
We'll look at techniques for writing better jQuery infused code, refactoring existing jQuery code, and writing good tests.

Having hit 2.0 recently, Ember.js is a front-end web framework for building ambitious web applications. In this talk, I discuss about reasons why I enjoy using Ember.js from the perspective of a designer and as a developer, while also giving an overview of Ember-CLI.

The world of JavaScript is moving faster than ever. There's a new framework, compile-to-JS language, or tool every day.
More than 156,000 packages are published on npm. We have conventions, like SemVer, that allow us to avoid some of the pitfalls of this rapid pace, but there are still questions we should ask ourselves. Does this speed produce the best code? What about the best APIs? Having been part of the gulp 4 and lodash 3 development efforts, I've found that taking time to think through your APIs before beginning development leads to better APIs and more concise code. In this talk, I plan to show the payoff to thinking through APIs before writing any code behind them with comparison to libraries that often release API breaking changes, which can cause users to have painful upgrade processes.