In this talk, he demonstrated that how these libraries are making JavaScript an excellent platform for mathematics and scientific computing in areas beyond machine learning by showing concrete examples of using the libraries to explore other exciting areas of mathematics.

Create an Engaging Native Mobile App with Vue and NativeScript

Jen Looper gave an informative talk introducing Nativescript. If you have a website build with Vue.js, with this framework, you can engage users even further through the native mobile app using the same technology.

In this talk, Jen explained the mechanic and the process building Elocute, a web app for language teachers with a paired mobile app that students use to perfect their spoken language skills.

Some highlights why Vue is great for mobile:

Vue’s 2.0 adoption of the virtual DOM enables native mobile rendering (Angular 2+ is similar),

enables (Angular 2+ is similar), Vue offers a great way for web developers to embrace mobile platforms via NativeScript or Weex,

Vue is lightweight so highly appropriate for mobile,

NativeScript and Vue have great code-sharing potential

The Q&A at the end of the talk is also interesting, such as:

Which one is better, start building the web app or mobile app? There is no particular recommendation, but most people build the web first, knowing that vue is since the beginning designed for websites.

The info about hot reloading feature that will be released soon.

There are some other talks about Vue, but I couldn’t watch because of the time constraint, such as:

A React Point of Vue — by Divya Sasidharan , Lucro Global LLC [presentation],

, Lucro Global LLC [presentation], Vue Vixens Workshop — by Jen Looper, Progress

GraphQL — Accelerated

GraphQL is a query language that is rapidly gaining broad adoption across the community. It combines type validation with a query and filtering syntax that makes it easy to get up-and-running with a powerful web API in almost no time. Features like running parallel queries or update-all become much more comfortable because they are first-class citizens of GraphQL. Add to that a vibrant community that keeps creating excellent tooling and documentation; it’s clear why GraphQL has become so popular with developers.

But every abstraction has a cost, and GraphQL is no exception. The added complexity and a new schema format to parse and execute mean new performance bottlenecks. In addition to performance issues, the wrong use of GraphQL can lead to architectural bottlenecks.

Instead of viewing this as a problem Matteo & Mathias took this as a challenge. In this talk, they covered what GraphQL is, why it’s great and how they made it run a lot faster on Node.js, in fact, much faster.

Machine Learning in the Browser with deeplearnJS

Even if you’ve never done anything with machine learning, you have probably already heard that it will change our way of thinking about computing forever. But how can you a web developer, who’s never been interested much in statistics benefit from the ML hype?

In this talk, Lian Li first explain what the difference between Expert Systems and Machine Learning. And then, she gave the tools to build a small self-learning application that runs entirely in the browser with deeplearn.js.

The code that presented in the talk is available here on Github.

Standardizing JavaScript — a Look at Ecma and TC39

It was Jory’s talk. Actually I didn’t watch this talk in full since it began, but still the last 10 minutes of the presentations were quite interesting.

The talk led us on a brief history of Javascript and introduction to Ecma, the standards body home to the JavaScript specification and its standardization efforts, what it means to create and implement open standards, and describe TC39’s role and impact on the world of web standards.

Jory Burson opened my eyes that how we create technology is as important as the technology itself.

NPM and the future of Javascript

Laurie Voss gave a fantastic talk on insights he had gathered, studying the NPM data. NPM has more than 10 million users, and they download 7 billion packages a week. In the talk, he stated that it gives them more data about what JavaScript users are doing and where the community is going than anybody else.

He presented the talk in three parts:

What you should know about npm, What npm knows about you, and The future of JavaScript

He gave some suggestions on what will be hot in 2019 and where the community is going. Here were my main takeaways:

React is slowing down,

Angular is seeing fewer downloads,

Vue most likely will be the next big thing (?),

GraphQL libraries are on the rise,

Learning from history: nothing last forever,

If people start re-using React modules, React will live forever,

Web components would be great if they worked but they don’t, yet…

And here some advised prediction for 2019:

Learn GraphQL,

You will be bundling, transpiling and linting for quite some time,

Use Typescript,

But whatever happens next, the future looks fun though ;D

Performance Optimizations for Progressive Web Apps

Most web developers can build a responsive site, but fail to meet performance requirements for mobile. In this talk, Chris Lorenzo covered why the performance of your site is so important and dive into the Chrome performance tools to explain precisely how a browser loads a site and what causes things to slow down.

Lastly, he also talked about how to create your own PWA with service workers and app installs. The slide is available here https://bit.ly/2kYFOjk.

Some other talks that also covered Progressive Web Apps topic:

Cross-platform Progressive Web Apps — by Simon MacDonald , Adobe [slides]

, Adobe [slides] Bridging the Designer-Developer Gap, PWA Edition — by Antoinette Janus, PBS Kids [slides]

Optimize Your JSON Payload Efficiency x10 times

In Cloud deployments, we foresee an exponential increase of JSON payload across distributed end-points, causing performance bottleneck in the application. In this talk, Gireesh Punathil presented a truly asynchronous version of standard JSON APIs that is highly scalable, fault-tolerant and highly consumable.

The critical functions of these APIs are to perform marshaling / un-marshaling of extensive data incrementally and yielding back to the application occasionally, improving the overall concurrency of the system, improving concurrency level by ten times above 1MB of JSON data.

Actually, I thought the speaker talked very slowly and not so clear to my ears, which may be because of at the time I sat on the back row. But detailed slides are available here for download.

Another talk that also in scaling related theme:

The Art of Building Node.js Projects at Scale — Raymond Feng, IBM [slides]

Scaling Webpack to Thousands of Concurrent Builds

Charlie Robbins’ talk titled “Scaling Webpack to Thousands of Concurrent Builds” was an excellent follow on what to do if you need a lot of builds across multiple environments like development, test, and production.

This talk covered the challenges (and solutions) to scale webpack & npm install to thousands of daily builds with high bursts of concurrency during peak hours.

Fast Talks

Before the closing remarks, we had “fast talks,” these were 10 minutes long talks on a variety of subjects.

Developing Code, Confidence and Community

First up, Corinne Warnshuis share some inspiring stories of empowerment from the community especially for women that interested in computer science.

Controlling Tesla Model 3 from Node.js

Next up, and my favorite fast talk was by Alex Roytman, demonstrated controlling Tesla Model 3 using Node.js and a tablet.

JavaScript: Enterprise Adoption and Usage

Despite being over two decades old, not until recent years has JavaScript indeed been acknowledged as a first-class citizen within corporate enterprise software.

And finally, we had Garth Hansen leading us to look at some of the hurdles JavaScript has overcome to reach its current level of adoption. And also a glance into JavaScript architecture and tooling being used today within The Walt Disney Company.

Final Thoughts

I thought this was an excellently ran conference. It included great speakers, engaging sponsors, and allowed a fantastic community to meet up — what else could you want!

Another interesting thing is that if we look at the range of companies represented by the speaker it would be hard to find more different areas of concern. We had someone from a commerce business, top open source projects, a finance-related company, not-for-profits and more! But yet there was still these common themes recurring again and again.