In today’s hype-driven culture, it’s hard to figure out what your next steps in innovation should be. Our curated lineup will guide you through the dense world of JS development to find the optimal learning path for the near future. 

JSConf Budapest

2020

Unfortunately, we still treat accessibility in the same way we deal with front-end development for older browsers, something to be done at the end. What if I tell you that we can use the latest Web APIs and still offer an inclusive and accessible experience.

In this talk, you'll learn how to combine Web APIs such as Speech Recognition and Geolocation, with performant Javascript techniques to create empathic user interfaces.

Accessibility vs latest Web APIs. Can’t we just get along?

In an ecosystem undergoing constant flux, what does it mean for an API to be modern? In this talk, I'll discuss the work that's taken place over the last year to deliver modern JavaScript APIs to developers in the Electron project, and the obstacles we encountered along the way.

We'll discuss updates ranging from asynchronous JS to idiomatic getters and setters, as well as allowing developers to access new platform-dependent functionalities. Our APIs can and often are implemented across two or more languages on their way to the end user, and so we'll walk through some examples of how to effectively gather context and write reusable code to make updating simpler.

You'll come away with a deeper understanding of how open source projects can more effectively balance innovation with maintenance, as well as perspectives on how to appropriately consider end-users and their needs when modernization affects the code they use.

API Modernization: Building Bridges As You Cross Them

Are you afraid of testing in production? Do you test in production? Do you use real data? By definition testing in production is hard. 

This talk puts together my experience testing in production a large scale system that affects millions of users. Experience, ideas, limits, roadblocks, tips and more.

Testing in production: Ideas, experiences, limits, roadblocks

What if you could interact with interfaces and devices using your clothes? When we think about wearable garments, we usually think of the technology as an output. We might think of LED dresses or designer-made outfits that react to the environment but what if instead, we used this technology as an input, as a way to interact with other things.

I have been prototyping wearable interfaces in JavaScript to use clothes as an input device and, in this talk, I will walk through the process of making interactive clothing using conductive textile, show what it can do and talk about the possibilities and limits of such technology.

Weaving the web - Programming textile-based interactions

Building web applications to power the refugee aid movement results in some interesting performance considerations. 

Will it load on a refugee camp’s wifi, shared by 500 people and beamed in from a town 4km away? Can it work offline, so that aid workers in the field can still get their job done even if they lose cell signal? Will it run on anything from a decade old donated laptop running Windows Vista to a brand new iPhone X? Is it easy to use by the hundreds of short term volunteers who show up each week? 

This talk will discuss performance considerations for these questions, explore trade-offs, and describe our current solution. It will focus on javascript, but also touch on other web technologies or organizational considerations where appropriate.

More details on the Taylor's work:

https://gitlab.com/distribute-aid/toolbox
https://www.facebook.com/DistributeAidDotOrg
https://twitter.com/DistributeAid

JS in Extreme Conditions: WebApps for the Refugee Aid Movement

Functional programming can be difficult to learn. Although there are many practical lessons, they are often hidden through academic lingo and dry examples. What if these basics could be livened up and taught through the lens of music? 

Together, we will go over some of the basics of functional programming including functional array manipulation, closure, immutability, and composing functions. As I go through these, I will show how they can be applied to the creation of music and musical instruments using the web audio API.

Composing music with composed functions

Debugging JavaScript can drive developers crazy. It’s not surprising when so many us stick to the trusty console.log - but there are better ways. 

From tracking down a critical issue in production, to simply struggling to add a new feature and not realising you’ve misread some documentation - debugging skills are used every day but it's difficult to take the time to improve those skills when the pressure is on. 

This talk will show you some really handy techniques that will level up your skills of deductive reasoning.

Essential JavaScript debugging tools for the modern detective

I’m introvert. This can be bit unfortunate, when you are a person that enjoys spending a lot of their free time creating things bedazzled with LEDs… only to rarely wear them out in public. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In an effort to actually share my weird and wonderful creations with others, I decided create a wearable project that would force me to be sociable in order for it to reveal its magic. In this talk, I’ll share how I used machine learning with javascript and tiny computers to make “fashion” that is responsive to the people around you and the attention you are (or aren’t) receiving.

How not to read the room: Creating socially awkward wearables

Raise your hands if you all start to panic when you mess up your local git workflow, trying frantically to save your work and eventually giving in to the complications thereby deleting your repository. Well, Git isn’t the terrible dinosaur you think it is, on the contrary, the messier it becomes, the more interesting it gets. 

This session aims to make friends with Git and to express the hidden gems in the mysterious git land which will definitely help you to become more productive and look cool in front of your peers struggling with a git-gone-wild.

Taming `Git`osaurus Using Mystical Trees

A lot of performance optimisations are easy on paper, but difficult in reality. Jake & Surma dig into look at the optimisations they made for https://proxx.app, and dig into the build tools that made them possible.

Making things fast in world of build tools

Flat, muted minimalism, vast fields of whitespace, millennial pink landing pages, and those corporate illustrations that all kind of look the same: the internet today, amirite? In the West, consumers and web developers have deep-rooted expectations of how the web should work and look that have gone largely unquestioned.

In this talk, we'll take stock of these biases and take a culturally relativistic look at the internet outside of our comfort zone. We'll explore questions like: Why are Japanese websites so information-dense? How does a script like Arabic, read right to left, affect web design? What languages do (or can) programmers across the world use? Attendees of this talk will walk away with a fresh perspective and ideas for improving our web and making technology that's more inclusive of a global audience.

Web Norms of the World: An exploration of the internet beyond the West

The Serverless paradigm is one that is slowly taking over the internet. This talk dives deep into Serverless, particularly Serverless Lambda Functions, and their benefits and drawbacks to web applications.

We will also discuss how they can benefit business, being extremely cheap to implement and maintain. As a practical, technical case study, we will examine serverless performance across a number of popular front-end UI frameworks and measure various metrics relevant to a serverless application.

Legendary Lambdas

Did you ever feel like monkey patching your UI component? Adding too many if/else, handling a lot of complexity or hacking several non-desired side effects. Did you ever have a problem with double-clicking an async button? Fetching multiple times the same resource in a row? Did you have problems translating UX interfaces and mock-ups into your applications scenes?

All this kind of problems can be properly fixed by applying a different point of view. An architecture based upon Mealy state machines. Also known as finite state machines or automatas. These machines are deterministic, pure and idempotents. Opening a new set of possibilities from predictable components to autogenerated tests.

Let's take a look to this new paradigm for UI components. You'll discover a better and cleaner world ;)

Mastering UIs with Finite State Machines

Early last year, my colleagues and I did something amazing — using only JavaScript, the browser, and the Web Audio API, we were able to decipher brainwaves. It sounds sensational, but it’s (mostly) true. This is a story about how we converted brainwaves into audio signals — and then back again — to solve the problem of epilepsy diagnosis on the web.

In this talk, you’ll get to see a new browser API being used in a novel and unprecedented way, combined with world-leading innovations in the field of epilepsy diagnosis. You’ll learn about the challenges of real-time brainwave filtering and how we solved them. As you’ll see, the technologies we use each day can sometimes be applied in unexpected ways. And sometimes, they make a huge difference in the lives of others.

Come along for the journey as we decipher brainwaves in the browser.

Deciphering Brainwaves with the Web Audio API

Do I want to track my cycles? Yes. Do I want the tracker to push my data to a third party? Hell NO! Do I want the data lying around unencrypted in a database somewhere? Not really. Do I want backup and access from multiple devices? Kinda.. What would I need to learn and is it even possible? 

Come along on my journey, as a run of the mill web developer, to create a secure and private web-based period tracker.

A privacy first period tracker? Is it even possible?

Explore the bewitching ways we can modify web videos and create immersive experiences worthy of the ‘80s using JavaScript and CSS. 

In 1985 pop music was mesmerized by the a-ha “Take on me” music video. It’s been almost 35 years since then, the world needs new catchy tunes with impressive video animations… on the web.

In this talk we will explore the bewitching ways we can modify web videos and create immersive experiences worthy of the ‘80s using JavaScript and CSS. Let us swim in the why-not possibility of Chroma key, Rotoscoping and more video animation techniques on the web platform!

Take on me, web browsers!

Open source modules on the NPM ecosystem are undoubtedly awesome. However, they also represent an undeniable and massive risk. 

You’re introducing someone else’s code into your system, often with little or no scrutiny. The wrong package can introduce severe vulnerabilities into your application, exposing your application and your user's data. 

This talk will use a sample application, Goof, which uses various vulnerable dependencies, which we will exploit as an attacker would. 

For each issue, we'll explain why it happened, show its impact, and – most importantly – see how to avoid or fix it.

StrangerDanger: Finding Security Vulnerabilities Before They Find You!

Algorithms are mysterious beasts that hard to catch in the source code. However, well-chosen data structures and efficient algorithms applied to a web app is a key to performance. 

I want to show how to fit the knowledge you got at the university can solve your daily routines.

Algorithms and Their Habitat

You have written all the unit tests, integration and e2e tests imaginable to your project, your code coverage is in the skies, you are sure that everything is in working order, your application is ready to ship. Or is it? Frontend developers often face the challenge that even a plethora of tests don’t cover visual differences, and while the functionality might be working and protected by tests, we don’t know much about the layout’s and visual styles’ correctness. Writing unit tests or manual testing for visual styles is tiresome and error-prone, so at BlackRock we came up with a better solution.

Using Storybook we have developed a way of comparing visual differences of the rendered images of our presentational components. This solution enabled us to discover unwanted visual changes at once without manual testing the entire application with every release. Presentation, or dumb  components are a function of their inputs, from the components point of view, their state is immutable, which enabled us to individually test the possible variations of the components, simply by providing them different inputs.

In this talk I’m going through the technicalities of our approach, and discuss how any team could implement a similar solution. I’m also going to discuss how we integrated visual testing the continuous development process and how we involved the UX and UI designers in the testing process.

Testing presentation components visually

The tech industry has a longtime history of cultivating heroes and epic stories of success. “Look how this tiny startup became an industry giant!”, “Did you hear Joe just got his dream job?”, “Learn how to ship amazing projects to production in no time!”. We’ve all heard stories like these and they are indeed very inspiring, but how come no one is talking about the ugly parts? Why aren’t stories of things that didn’t work out more common in tech? Why aren’t we more transparent about our experiences and what we learned from them?

In this talk, I’ll go through all the lessons I took from failing miserably at a software project, how that made me a much better developer and the importance of failure in the career of a software engineer.

Hungary