I attended the Node+JS Interactive conference last week in Vancouver. I found that every session I went to sparked some kind of idea for ways we can improve our product and workflow at Thinkific, and also for some personal projects I want to get started on. The only problem is deciding what I want to start first because there is so much 🙈
There was a strong female speaker presence which was refreshing (although it shouldn’t be surprising since its 2018). I also appreciated that there were no all-male diversity panels and all of the female speakers were discussing technical topics, not "what its like being a female developer 🙄". So good job Node+JS Interactive (even though its 2018 and I shouldn’t have to be congratulating you on this).
The last day of the conference they did a workshop where they had about 300 people contribute to the Node.js project. I was v impressed with how streamlined it was - I built Node locally, ran the tests, got a tiny task to work on, submitted a PR and was approved all in about 2 hours. And now I can say that I contribute to the open source community 🙃 I’m very proud of my pull request.
The talks that got me the most jazzed were:
Leaving the CDN Behind: Building a JavaScript SDK in a Serverless World - Daniel Brain
Main Takeaways: Dynamically compile relevant code used by a component and cache it for speed. SDK is available at a url that specifies the component. Stays evergreen so you don’t have to worry about versioning and maintaining older versions
Slides
Automated Performance Testing - Christian Bromann
Main Takeaways: You should come up with performance metrics for your app (ie. it should be interactive in less than 5 seconds) and integrate automated testing in your CI/CD workflow. One option for tooling is WebDriver.
Slides
Video
Machine Powered Refactoring: Leverage AST’s to Push your Legacy Code (& the Web) Forward - Amal Hussein
Main Takeaways: You can make custom linters and refactor old code using ASTs. We just did a tiny little dive into the world of ASTs but it seems very powerful. I can definitely see applications for creating custom accessibility linters that we’ve been meaning to build out to make accessibility a priority for developers.