In our second edition of CityJSConf we had another successful event hosted at Curzon Soho Cinema and Microsoft Reactor.  

The first two days had 6 Free workshops that were given by our sponsors and other very well known speakers covering areas such as Fullstack Development, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, JamStack and MongoDB Serveless tools. 

During the main event we had 10 international speakers and 1 comedy act Smoosh.  

Our talks covered a number of areas as well and highlights can be seen below.

CityJS

In a world where developer experience is often at odds with end user performance and experience, attempts to keep these conflicts at peace are evolving rapidly.

This talk will look at some of the benefits and challenges with more common approaches to server-side rendering (SSR), and explore our team’s journey into finding a better faster awesomer approach.

Building Apps with Dojo, A Progressive TypeScript Framework for Modern Web Apps

In this talk, we'll see what real-time messaging and data streaming means, from the protocol level of applications. 

We'll also look at various open source tools to implement the real-time messaging architecture to stream data both within and outside of your applications and address the unforeseen challenges involved, with code examples in Node.js and JavaScript. 

In the end, we'll look the evolution of the data sharing economy, the various protocols, some standardised and some not, all of which you need to know to be at the top of your tech game.

The Current State of the Data Sharing Economy

The "exotic" types of testing that interest me here (fuzz testing, generative testing, property-based testing, metamorphic testing and mutation testing) are not talked about much in the JS community. I believe that is not because they are known to be unhelpful, but rather because little is known about them at all.
 
Libraries to enable these sorts of testing are still immature, but now reaching a point where it is possible for developers to try them out and come to their own opinions about the value of these testing approaches.
 
My aim in this talk is therefore to educate about alternative testing methodologies and encourage the trialling of new tools so that the community can better gauge the value of the techniques they make possible.

The Oracle at Delphi Neither Speaks nor Conceals

JavaScript starting with ES6 offered a lot of new syntax and features. Most helps saving lines of code needs, while improves code readability and reduces the learning curve for the language.

Yet usage of these syntax without considering consequences nor situation can bring the exact opposite result. In this session, we will discuss about these pitfalls, and how to develop more proactive coding habit.

Syntactic Sugar - Diabetes Alert

JavaScript probably isn't the first language which springs to mind when you say 'machine learning', but that does seem to be changing, especially with the release of TensorFlow.js last year.
 
This talk gives a high level overview of what machine learning and neural networks are, shows how to get started with TensorFlow.js, and demos a number of projects which use JavaScript and AI.

Machine Learning and JavaScript

In my experience with JavaScript/Node.js devs I find out that Streams is a topic still mostly unexplored and sometimes even feared. This is probably one of the most beautiful features of Node.js and it can be adopted also in the browser.
 
Once you grasp the fundamentals, you'll be able to solve some ordinary programming challenges in a much more elegant and efficient way, so this is a very interesting topic. In this talk, I will cover the following topics: Streams: when and how;
 
Different types of streams; Built-in and custom streams; Composability; Stream utils; Streams in the browser.

It's About Time to Embrace Streams

Being a JavaScript developer is pretty messy. The frontend development world is in constant change and we don't even stop to analyse what we're doing any more. 

We build libraries to fix problems and keep using them although the problems are gone. We stifle creativity and innovation by telling people off for "doing things wrong". And we don't even consider understanding what others did before replacing it with the next new thing. 

Let's take a breather and stop chasing great ideas not very likely to ever be how we work. We need more people to work on interfaces. Let's concentrate on what matters.

feTurbulence; Important!

The web platform features I’ll cover in this talk (particularly Service Workers) are important topics in the JavaScript community for helping us build performant applications with great user experiences, but they also have some interesting characteristics that we can use to do things that previously weren’t possible in JavaScript.

This talk will encourage us to think about different ways we might be able to leverage these new features while giving a practical example with real code. So even if you are not interested in creating your own image format, you should walk away with some insights into the power and flexibility of the modern web platform.

Creating Your Own Image Format in the Browser

I've been developing in JavaScript for nearly 20 years and so am used to solving every problem with a JavaScript-shaped hammer. I don't think I'm alone in this, and wanted to break out of that mindset. Over my career I've professional developed in 16 different languages (and used a further 10 out of curiosity) so I set about re-writing the same code in each of those languages. The purpose of the exercise was (and is) to learn, re-learn, and refresh my memory of these programming languages.
 
By focusing on the paradigms, syntax, data types, and structure of the code I was able to draw parallels between them and JavaScript which encourages me to think outside of the JavaScript-shaped box. This talk will take you on that journey of discovery highlighting many ideas you can take back into your own code, and well as giving an insight into many other languages you might not have seen. It will also make you thankful, or otherwise, by showing what you need to work through in other languages to achieve the same results as JavaScript.

Ada 99: Rewriting the very first computer program:  How does JavaScript stack up?

Once upon a time, you could do all sort of crazy things on the web like run Java programs, and build animations using Flash. There were no standards, so developers had to make different versions of every website they built so that they’re compatible with the browsers at the time.

The web saw both a rise in creativity, and in really serious security vulnerabilities, as it became exponentially harder to develop for it.

With the adoption of (much needed) web standards and the dotCom crash, the focus has shifted to stabilizing and unifying the way we build, consume, and think about the web, and naturally some of the technologies died along the way being unable to keep up. 
 
The web as most of us know it today became variations of the same ideas and ways of building, with one language to rule the ecosystem : JavaScript. Some also argue that the web became ‘serious,’ corporate, and a way to make money, to the detriment of creativity and innovation. 
 
But the idea of running other languages on the web was still in people’s hearts, so a new glimmer of hope was born, and named WebAssembly or WASM. Simply put, WASM provides other languages like C++ and Rust a compilation target so that they can run on the web. All designed to nicely play alongside JavaScript. How exciting is that!?
 
In this talk, we will explore WASM as a way of bringing things that are not of the web, to the web. We will discuss how WebAssembly can open the web to even more engineers and creators, and boost creativity and innovation in a secure way.

CityJS 2019

May 1 - May 3 | London, UK