Conference day 1| 10:30 – 11:00| Millenium Stage

TBA

Conference day 1| 11:30 – 12:00| Discovery Stage

Real-time & Offline-ready Serverless GraphQL with AppSync

Building your own real-world, secure & scalable GraphQL API is a lot of work. With AppSync, robust GraphQL APIs including schema, resolvers, and data sources are created & configured automatically and instantly through either the AWS Amplify CLI or the AppSync console, abstracting away much of the complexity traditionally involved with setting up a new GraphQL backend.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate and discuss the more interesting and powerful functionality that AppSync offers and do so in a way that developers will walk away with a confident understanding of how AppSync works and can be extended to help them in their day to day.

We’ll also create a real AppSync API & connect to a React application in a demo to demonstrate what we discussed in the talk in a live coding exercise, showing how to create queries, mutations & subscriptions directly from a client-side application.”

Conference day 1| 17:00 – 17:30| Millennium Stage

Curious Use Cases of GraphQL

As GraphQL moves into the mainstream, the tooling & ecosystem has grown and has made it possible to do much more with GraphQL than using it as just a data layer. In this talk, I’ll show how developers are using GraphQL as an API gateway to accomplish things that you may have never thought possible.

More details:

When we think of GraphQL at the resolver level, we typically associate some type of database as the resolver data source, but in practice a resolver is simply a function. What this means is that we can do much more with our GraphQL APIs & our resolvers than we ever thought possible, including things like taking existing REST APIs & transforming them into GraphQL APIs (http resolvers), passing the query to Lambda or serverless functions for processing & returning the response via a GraphQL query (for things like AI & ML), geospatial & time-based queries (passing the query to Elasticsearch), & even VR & AR apps (passing in user location / app info & using the subscription to transmit image assets). In this talk, I’ll walk through what this looks like in theory & in practice, demoing 4 different applications that implement this functionality & showing the code that make the magic happen.

Conference day 1| 14:30 – 15:00| Discovery Stage

Crafting Comics for Literally Everyone

Remember loving to read comics on a Sunday afternoon when you were a kid? Maybe you don’t. In the past, traditional print comics have made it impossible for blind and visually-impaired readers to experience their heroes’ adventures first-hand. Today an increasing number of initiatives like comic book stores for the blind aim to overcome this challenge.

What if I told you that the web platform empowers us to even create comics for literally everyone?

Alongside a demo application, you see how accessibility best practices enable you to craft an immersive webcomic experience that is not only engaging for the sighted but accessible for everyone.

Conference day 2| 18:00 – 18:30| Millenium Stage

Predicting the Future of the Web

The Web has changed a lot since its beginning as a platform for static articles. At first, Web applications did not exist. Then they began to appear in the form of servers generating HTML on the fly. PHP was huge, then fell by the wayside as JS rose. Flash came and went. Today, the Web has become the biggest application delivery platform in history and based on its past, the one thing we can be certain of is that more changes are yet to come.

What, specifically, might those changes be? What differences might the Web of 2020 have to the the Web of 2019? What about the Web of 2025? What would the impact be on Web developers? In this talk, Richard draws on his 12 years of professional Web development experience, and history of being an early adopter of technologies like React in 2013 and Elm in 2014, to make and justify some concrete predictions about the future of the Web in both 2020 and 2025.

Conference day 2| 11:30 – 12:00| Millennium Stage

Secret Tips to Improve Your Webpack Configuration

Conference day 2| 14:00 – 14:30| Millennium Stage

Resiliency and PWAs

The next billion users face environmental factors that are vastly different to most developers.

This talk will take a fresh approach to addressing the needs of users in remote or austere environments

by building on top of current PWA standards for a web resilient web experience.

Conference day 2| 11:30 – 12:00| Millennium Stage

Secret Tips to Improve Your Webpack Configuration

Conference day 1| 17:30 – 18:00| Millennium Stage

Designing in React

Conference day 1| 12:00 – 12:30| Discovery Stage

Onivim 2: Re-Architecting for Performance

Electron is one of the most popular platforms today for building cross-platform desktop applications. We shipped v1 of our code editor, Onivim, using Electron, and while it was wonderful to leverage web technologies and frameworks like ReactJS, we faced numerous performance challenges.

In order to meet our performance goals, we decided to re-architect and move to a native solution based on ReasonML. In the process, we built a new desktop application framework called Revery, which lets us enjoy the ReactJS & Redux style of development… but with native code performance! This move has drastically improved our startup time, responsiveness, and memory usage. In addition, we’ve been able to take a new approach to our core architecture – leveraging functional programming principles.

We’ll discuss our journey of shipping a cross-platform desktop app with this new technology stack, and share our successes and challenges in migrating from TypeScript/React/Electron to ReasonML/Revery for Onivim v2.

Conference day 2| 17:30 – 18:00| Millennium Stage

Rust for JavaScripters

Conference day 2| 11:30 – 12:00| Discovery Stage

Backpressure: Resistance is NOT futile

Backpressure—resistance opposing the desired flow of data through software—from massive scale, to death by a thousand cuts, it’s something nearly every software engineer will have to deal with at some point on the client and server. For some, it’s a frequent problem. But the term itself isn’t nearly as understood and recognized. In this talk, we’ll discover what backpressure really is, when it happens, and the strategies you can apply to deal with it.

Conference day 2| 15:30 – 16:00| Millennium Stage

Futurist Code Bases: Integrating JS of the Future Today

The future is now. Or then. Or it will be soon be now, but now is then.

JavaScript and its ecosystem is ever evolving and JS fatigue can be real. It’s a lot to keep up with. Staying up to date on the ever moving system feels like a fool’s errand and to some degree it can be.

But in this talk we’re going to chat about a few things:

– what’s new and important now with ES2018, ES2019 and beyond
– what’s new and important in the JavaScript ecosystem and tooling
– how to sanely integrate new features, tools, and such into your existing codebase today.
– how to get the most of using VSCode with futurist code

Come chat about the future and how to touch it today.

Conference day 1| 14:00 – 14:30| Millenium Stage

Cypress.io – the State of the Art End-to-end Testing Tool

This talk shows how quick and simple it can be to write end-to-end tests for web applications – if your testing tools are not fighting you all the time. I will go over writing E2E tests using Cypress.io, controlling the network during tests, using visual testing and setting up continuous integration to perform E2E tests on each commit.

Conference day 2| 10:30 – 11:00| Discovery Stage

“Breaking out of box” or writing a wasm-based Gameboy emulator in Rust for frontend-developers

Everyone wants to put us in a box, but today we’re going to break out – no webpack, no v8, none of the dizzying 1,000 levels of magic and abstraction that we alternatively enjoy and wrestle with day to day. Instead, we’ll take a journey to simpler times with a gameboy emulator, where every line of code we write maps to an exact cycle count on a known CPU.

We’ll simultaneously learn about this newfangled language called “Rust,” and how it allows us to express the low-level designs of this ancient CPU while sussing out high-level, zero-cost abstractions for our modern code. We’ll compile a web-assembly (“wasm”) binary to run in the browser to explore interop between Rust, wasm, and JavaScript, and see what a full toolchain looks like.

Finally, our journey near its end, we’ll reflect on why we would care about stories about low-level CPU programming; what we lose and gain from JavaScript’s wonderful abstractions, and most importantly, what it all means to us as engineers.

Conference day 1| 15:30 – 16:00| Discovery Stage

Vulcan.js: Building the “Rails for JavaScript”

We all love the modern JavaScript stack, but why does it sometimes feel like it takes us weeks to achieve what Rails developers can do in one afternoon? In this talk, I’ll use my own experience building Vulcan.js –a full-stack GraphQL JavaScript framework– to explore what a modern “Rails for JavaScript” would look like, and seek out the path to reclaiming our lost productivity.

Conference day 2| 17:00 – 17:30| Millennium Stage

Mind-Reading with Intelligent & Adaptive UIs

Conference day 2| 10:00 – 10:30| Discovery Stage

Be Lazy, Be Smart, Be Nuxt.

Nuxt.js is a framework based on Vue.js giving you all the tools to create any kind of applications (Universal, SPA and Statically Generated) while keeping performances and best practices at the top. Sebastien will demonstrate how to create a web application quickly by using Nuxt.js and explaining how it works under the hood. Giving you confidence for your next Vue applications.

Conference day 2| 10:30 – 11:00| Millennium Stage

Contribution system

Conference day 1| 11:30 – 12:00| Millenium Stage

Building Robust Design Systems

How many times have you released a feature and then realized that it wasn’t accessible? Or maybe you delivered it and realized that all of the components looked slightly different than another flagship product? You need a design system.

Design systems ensure that all products are in line with the brand vision while maintaining accessibility, responsiveness, and customizability. They provide design and engineering teams with the tools they need to build robust products.

In this talk, we will take a dive into the world of Design Systems, and learn what it takes to build a successful system.

Conference day 2| 14:00 – 14:30| Discovery Stage

Protecting Your npm Dependencies

As technology advances and the applications we build become more complex, the tools that we use to secure the data shared within these products need to follow suit. We need to ensure that we deliver a high standard of protection to users, allowing them them to seamlessly use the product without thinking about security or any potential threat. Even just a thought of any risk could lose us our customers’ trust and therefore millions in investment and in turn threaten our entire business as a whole (including our jobs).

A security breach is a very real problem, both personally as an individual and professionally in a business sense. But we as developers can help fix this problem. In very recent years there has been a number of incidents involving npm dependencies pushing vulnerabilities to consumers or exposing data. This led to the npm team purchasing a security tool to prevent future incidents. These incidents can easily be stopped and further prevented from happening again. NPM is the first main carrier of personal information and it, therefore, should be where we start to repair these issues.

In this talk, we will look back on the previous incidents and do a postmortem investigation on what happened, and how it could have been prevented. We will then take a further look into tools and products that can help protect our applications going forward and some basic best security practices that we all should follow, no matter our application. “

Conference day 2| 10:00 – 10:30| Millennium Stage

Gatsby High Level

Conference day 2| 16:00 – 16:30| Millennium Stage

Don’t Believe the Rumors: Writing Tests for CSS is Possible

You know that fear. The fear of changing something in your CSS. Deleting a CSS rule is a lesson in getting yourself to calm down, telling yourself that it’s OK, you are absolutely _sure_ that deleting that rule won’t change anything.

And only manual testing can assuage that fear. And yet, even then, you’re still frightened that you haven’t checked _everything_, and that you missed something. Not to mention that it’s amazingly boring.

Never fear again! Testing your CSS code, testing the _visual_ aspects of your code, is now possible, and I will show how. A slew of new Saas tools have come to the forefront which enable us to write tests that check that everything is the same that it was (even if we moved from BEM to CSS-in-JS).

So grab that keyboard, refactor your CSS, because writing tests for it is now possible!

Conference day 1| 12:00 – 12:30| Millennium Stage

Expo for Web

Progressive web apps can be difficult to support, hard to test, and _unfortunate_ to maintain. With Expo for web you can maximize code sharing between your native and web apps. The robust set of Unimodules provides you with unified APIs for things like camera, gestures, image picker, persistent storage, and more. Optimized for performance, Expo’s Babel preset enables you to do advanced tree-shaking which removes all unused platform code. New universal testing libraries make it easy to ensure your app is running as expected on all platforms. Expo web also provides a set of Webpack plugins for adding offline support and automatic generation of PWA assets. I’ll be discussing this, and possibly some future plans for supporting things like universal navigation, SSR, and connected applications with things like apple site association.

Conference day 1| 16:00 – 16:30| Discovery Stage

How a 16th Century French Mathematician Helped Build a Design System

When you’re building a component library or a design system, you’d want to visualize how the growing number of components look in their different states and variations. One way to achieve this would be writing every possible variation of the component by hand. This is a manual process, harder to maintain and means a lot of lines of code. What do we all have in common as developers? We hate all those 3 things.
In this talk, you’ll find out how you can automate your component variation rendering process and improve your workflow by applying the Cartesian Component concept. The code will be presented in React but the concept is applicable to the components written in other frameworks as well

Conference day 1| 16:00 – 16:30| Millenium Stage

TypeScript: Seeing Past the Hype

Typescript is in full hype mode right now. Twitter gives us a new hot take daily, but most of us haven’t seen the long term benefits. Dropbox switched to Typescript in 2015 and we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. In this talk we’ll take a step back from the hype and cover what we’ve learned over the past four years. We’ll discuss how static typing has helped us scale a codebase, and when it’s worth it just to write an any and move on with your life.

Conference day 1| 10:30 – 11:00| Millennium Stage

Native Web Apps: React and WebAssembly to Rewrite Native Apps

Can React and web technologies compete with native toolkits when it comes to making super complex, rich desktop apps? Can we go further and create better-than-native applications? 🤔 Sounds like a good challenge

This talk introduces how React, JavaScript and WebAssembly can be used to write new ambitious apps, or port existing ones – with the real-world example of my open-source game development software. I’ll show how to leverage the React ecosystem to create performant applications: architecture, patterns, typing, useful open-source modules… and how to go one step further and provide a better user experience as well as a better developer experience.

These apps are not web apps, they are not native apps, they are hybrid “Native Web Apps” and can provide the best of both worlds.

Conference day 1| 10:00 – 10:30| Millenium Stage

Increasing Velocity with GraphQL and PostgreSQL

GraphQL has exploded in popularity since its public launch in 2015, and PostgreSQL is still going strong after 20 years of development, gaining market share and impressive features at an ever-increasing rate. These tools can pair beautifully, in particular, because they’re both strongly typed and declarative. In this talk, we’ll learn how combining these two technologies can lead to massively increased software development and delivery speed, faster APIs, fewer bugs, and ultimately enable you to focus on delivering value on the frontend rather than maintaining three different layers of data models and associated logic on the backend (DB, application, API).

Conference day 1| 10:00 – 10:30| Discovery Stage

Learning from High Profile Failures

Tech companies of all sizes have dropped the ball when it comes to the privacy of their users. Many users find themselves asking, “How could this breach have happened?” and “What happened to my data?”. Surprisingly, many of these large-scale data breaches have been 100% preventable. I’d like to walk through the pitfalls of some of the largest data breaches of the past few years, what we’ve learned from them and how engineering teams can avoid them going forward.

Conference day 1| 18:00 – 18:30| Millennium Stage

Indecisions Are Not All Bad

All our software is a bundle of decisions. But despite the fact that some decisions can have a long-lasting, crippling effect on our app, we make most of them based on guesses.
But what if the best decision is indecision? What if you could postpone most of your decision until you gather enough facts in order to make the optimal one?
In this talk, we will learn why deferring decisions can result in a much better, simpler code base. We’ll see examples of decisions we think we have to take on day 1 of the project, yet, can (and should) be postponed and see how practices like Spikes and the right design of your application will allow that to happen.

Conference day 2| 14:30 – 15:00| Discovery Stage

Many Frameworks – One PWA Solution

How does PWA concept play with YOUR favorite framework? React, Angular, Vue, #FrameworkOfTheWeek? In my technical session, we’ll check what major frameworks creators prepared for us regarding scaffolding / adding PWA features (spoiler: only basic features), and switch to Workbox. We’ll see that Workbox is a library providing many sophisticated service worker features in a simple, developer-friendly form. Also, we’ll talk about another advantage of Workbox – the flexibility: you build your own service worker and automate some tasks using this library. As the outcome, you’ll be ready to make a production-ready PWA from the app built on any framework.

Conference day 1| 17:00 – 17:30| Discovery Stage

Privilege as a Technical Debt

Belonging to an underrepresented group in the European tech scene myself, I most of the times struggle with colleagues who undervalue the principles of diversity and empathy.

I realised that these topics are rarely debated within the tech scene logically and pragmatically without pointing fingers.

Do you believe political correctness and empathy are buzzwords that limit the society rather than contribute to its advancement? Do you think talking about topics like diversity quotas, privilege doesn’t make much sense and you would rather spend this time talking about the latest in technology?

In this talk I would like to take the chance to try and add the missing contexts to such terms and arguments, moreover, I will try to go through various examples on how it can impact your product from a very pragmatic prospective.

You can find below a rough outline of the presentation:

Introduction to the speaker
Who Am I?
Why this & Why me?
The question of Privilege
Definition
Why Dictionary definitions don’t work?
Calculate your score game
Privilege as a technical debt
Refuting Common fallacious arguments
Intention Vs Impact
All Lives matter *
Mosquito bites
Reverse *ism
Inclusive Design
Pragmatic lack of Diversity failure examples
Name Dilema
The “Racist” camera phenomenon
The mysterious case of sexist Airbags
Inclusive Design
What do as?
A company
Employee
Tech Community Member
Clincher

Conference day 2| 16:00 – 16:30| Discovery Stage

Live-coding demo – Build your own backend in the `redux` style with GraphQL mutations (dispatch), `pure` serverless functions (reducers), and GraphQL subscriptions (updated state)

What if it was possible to build backend features for our react apps in the same way that we use redux in our react apps? In this live-coding demo, I will show you how we’ll add backend business logic using the redux abstractions of dispatching actions, writing reducers as pure functions and subscribing to updated state. Our backend will be completely serverless and using open-source and managed services so that we’re not actually deploying and maintaining any servers. We will use GraphQL mutations from our react app to dispatch actions. These will trigger serverless functions which are pure and return the modified state, which will be persisted safely on a cloud-managed database. Portions of your app that are subscribed to the state using GraphQL subscriptions (live-queries) will automatically update! You will witness the raw awesomeness of being able to use javascript and graphql in a pattern that you are comfortable with to build backend features from scratch.

Conference day 2| 14:00 – 14:30| Discovery Stage

Building a Music Learning Game with Elm, Web MIDI, and SVG Animation

Through a series of animated demos and funny failed experiments, join me on my journey towards building a musical game where the controller is a digital piano!

Highlights include:

– Using the Web MIDI API with Elm via JavaScript interop to get input from a digital piano directly in the web browser
– Exploring SVG animations in the Elm ecosystem
– Elm’s best features from the perspective of a beginner who recently fell in love with the language
– Silly and instructive beginner mistakes (how not to use Elm!)

Building my first Elm app was a two-for-one deal: learn functional programming and learn to sight-read sheet music! By the end of this talk, I hope you’ll be equally excited to combine these web technologies in your own creative adventures.

Conference day 2| 12:00 – 12:30| Discovery Stage

React Custom Hooks

The new way of coding React components using a pure functional style. The speech compares the coding style of React components using 1) Javascript classes and 2) pure functional style with hooks. Some advanced concepts of using custom hooks and developer and code performance are presented. The speech is for React practitioners (i.e hardcore 😉 ).