Full frontal JavaScript conference in Brighton

Warm up at asynch.js meetup

Having lived in Brighton for a few years in my Uni years, I was quite keen to get down there as soon as I could and get a nice bit of sea air. I travelled down the night before so I can attend the local javascript meetup, Asynch.js which is run by the rather nice chap Prem. The night was a lightning talk type setup for a show and tell session. I got there late so only saw half the talks but I managed to see a couple of interesting things including:

• An AR app built with my fave development platform Titanium
• A Phonegap based framework
• Json library implementing the extended verbs of REST. 

Since there was over 70 people signed up on Lanyard, there was quite a few people who ditched the idea and went straight to the pre-conf social (ok get drunk at the pub).

The conference setup

The venue was the Duke of York Picturehouse and it was pretty damn cool. Very handy having it at a cinema with comfy seats and a gigantic screen behind the speaker. There was the one main track and everything ran really smoothly from what I can tell. I'm always impressed when I attend events like this with so much co-ordination involved and having it go off without any major hitches. Well, at least I didn't see any Ofcourse there was the issue with the Wifi, but we were told well advance of the issue. Maybe they should look at multiplexing a load of usb wifi dongles

 

Presentations

I was amazed by the quality of the speakers, the content was overall nothing short of spot on. I felt I wasn't really disappointed by any of them. The range of topics covered ranged across the spectrum from very technical to architectural and ones which left you a nice warm feeling inside. As a quick round up on the ones that were my fave of the day.

CoffeeScript deign decisions (Jeremy Ashkenas)

A very good speaker and great intro to Coffeescript by non other then the guy who created it. I really like this talk as he stepped through the construction of the language through a deconstruction of javascript and also sanitising it, resulting in the output that is coffeescript.  The examples was really easy to follow as he went through all the basic stuff to more intermediate subjects. It was very interesting showing the coffee script followed by the "compiled" js output. Only downside was I would have probably taken more of it in if it wasn't the first talk and I was just waking up! Note to self, need extra shot of expresso next time.

     memorable tweet: "Intense and great talk on #coffeescript "hunger gotted""

Scalable Java Script Applications Architecture (Nicholas Jakas)

As I get (slightly) more mature as a developer, I am starting to think about the bigger issues of approaching builds in a sustainable and robust manner, I sometimes wonder about this thing called architecture. I was really looking forward to this talk and as a fellow attendee commented "This guy knows his sh*t". Nicholas outlined an approach which essentially decoupled your components with a three tier layer along with guidelines on what each layer should be comprised of. Good stuff and really enjoyed it. Hoping to have a chance to use some of the ideas in an upcoming project

 

Beyond the page

Glenn gave a talk on using the built in state of the various types of drag/drop things you can do within and between browsers. It was really interesting to see a the demo of the current integration between applications (ie between different browsers and desktop) and the ability to interact at different levels. His practical example was an online social address book through dropping in urls into (and between different!) browsers which automatically brought up user information from various sources. This type of interaction automatically created profiles on the user through sources from social graphs and I think linkedin . 

I kept on thinking about the Microsoft nirvana of data integration across it's various desktop applications A source of some of the worse viruses and worms sure, but wouldn't it be so good to have your data free and the "intent" realised by such a casual action of drag and drop? All achievable without manual bumming around by the user? He rounded the talk nicely with a bit of history from the old Lotus 1-2-3 days. Discussing briefly the point of how the accountants gained creative independence, data ownership, and portability which was the reason why Lotus became so successful.

Memorable tweet: 

Having a "how the hell do you do that?!!?!" moment with the beyond the page talk #awesome #fullfrontalconf"

 

Beyond the Planet of the Geeks (Brendan Dawes)

A bit more "airy fairy" non-technical section where Brendan gave a very entertaining talk on experimenting and playing with ideas with a strong sense purpose and iterative/evolutionary development. He used a real client project as a case study on the ways in which continually iterating a basic idea can lead to some interesting results. I felt he was drumming into us the idea that passion and playing ultimately leads to a satisfactory outcome. However from my perspective, only possible providing you can afford to keep chucking enough resource at it. It was interesting to note how he decided to drop his Flash skills and step out of his comfort zone to build the case study project completely in HTML5. I now know more about pencils and paper clicks then before as well.

Memorable Brendan line: "whoever said a bad workman blames his tools was a moron and I want to smash his head in with a beautifully made hammer"

 

You gotta do what you gotta do (Marcin Wichary)

The last talk was a really fun and quite inspirational talk from one of the user experience designers at google talking about google doodles. What grabbed me about the talk was the amount of time, effort and detail they go into each one as it only essentially lasted a day! To give a sense of the effort involved with relation to the number of lines of code:

 

• 2009: 1
• 2010: 5000
• 2011: 13000

One of the doodles mentioned was the famous pac man doodle. I hadn't known that Pac Man was actually a deterministic game, I had always thought it was random. So Marcin decided to program it as the original. What was quite surprising was that people had figured that out through reverse engineering the code and created a counter algorithm to it. Remember these things are on for less then a day!

He then went through the design iterations of various other ones, one of the ones which stuck out was the celebration of Martham Gratham doodle. Pushing the boundary of sprite animation to a whole new level! I wish I could find a picture of the overlay of the different sprites on top of each other, it was rather cool. What was built wasn't a complete bed of roses mind you. It's nice to see the humbleness of individuals such as Marcin when he showed examples of how he had to build things in an often less then optimal way (sometimes often broken code), just to get the main point across "If you code doesn't feel a bit nasty, you are probably behind".

 

In Conclusion

The conference turned out to be a lot more fun and beneficial then I imagined. As I mentioned before the quality of the speakers was superb. The in between random chats and networking fun was one of the main reasons to come to these things, the free bar after was an absolute bonus! The size of the conference was good but I feel that the temptation to make it bigger is going to make it hard for it to stay this small, this could easily be twice the size! I hope it stays at this size for next year.

I felt there was a really strong sense of community from talking to all sorts of people from a range of different backgrounds and doing different things. All willing to dive deep into what they're doing. In the space of a fairly short conference I was talking to js developers in various industries building different things from mobile native, mobile web, games and embedded systems. It just goes to show how diverse js is and where it touches.

Though I think I could be breaking some kind of taboo to quote my own tweet, I think overall I had described the experience it best in less then 140 characters:

"Today I feel inspired, learnt something new, amazed, down trodden(how little I know) and more driven. thank u #fullfrontalconf and @rem"