Trent Willis

Have you ever learned a new technology? Were you uncomfortable? Intimidated? That was Trent's recent experience when he had to learn a new framework: React.

Have you ever learned a new technology? Were you uncomfortable? Intimidated? That was Trent's recent experience when he had to learn a new framework: React. 

In this talk, Trent shares his journey as an experienced developer embarking on a new project, in a new tech stack. He'll explore how to develop confidence using new tech, why team culture is vital to successful learning, and what to do when learning is hard. 

He hopes to encourage you to be a developer who is confident and excited about learning new frameworks.

2020

ReactConf AU

How to teach an old dev new tech: Learning React as a senior developer

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.

2019

CityJS

Creating Your Own Image Format in the Browser

Explore patterns and libraries to make working with Web Workers easier.

The single-threaded nature of JavaScript can make handling lots of data or complex processing in your web application difficult to balance with providing a good user experience. Web Workers promise to help us find that balance and let us build fast and responsive applications even when doing heavy work, but the APIs for working with them leave much to be desired. 

In this talk, we’ll explore useful patterns for making Web Workers easier to work with and highlight effective ways to communicate between workers, handle complex data processing off the main thread, and test and debug them.

JS Kongress

Weaving Webs of Workers

One of the primary goals for testing software is to have confidence that your software works as intended, but this doesn't give much insight into the quality of the software.

One of the primary goals for testing software is to have confidence that your software works as intended, but this doesn't give much insight into the quality of the software. Is it performant? How about accessible? Are we sending too much code? Answering these questions in an automated fashion today is hard, but that will be changing in the future.

In this talk, Trent explores how recent changes in technology give us a foundation to start answering the questions posed above and so much more. He looks at a near future where we have confidence that our software is functional and works well.