JSConf Uruguay 2014

"Be part of the future"

** Some time ago the Sophilabs team started to think about the possibility of carrying out the first JSConf in Uruguay. That idea became our aim in 2013, after noticing huge interest in the Javascript Meetups. We looked for people who would like to take part of the organizers group and thanks to Guillermo Rauch and Chris Williams we got approval to organize the first JSConf event in Uruguay. Then, we just started thinking big.**

The result: Last March 14th and 15th, the Antel Auditorium held a sold-out the conference with more than 20 speakers and 350+ attendees from all over the world, who met together to learn, share ideas and have a lot of fun.

We were delighted by different speakers like Douglas Crockford, Jeremy Ashkenas, Benoit Marchant, James Halliday, Guillermo Rauch, Forbes Lindesay and many others ( meet all the speakers).

A brief summary of the conference

First day

The conf started full-power with Guillermo Rauch. The result was great and we can see it on Weplay.io. Additional points for choosing Pokemon Yellow to demonstrate the concept! Then we listened to Forbes Lindesay talking about Jade: “A templating language”, we were impressed by his eloquence.

After the first coffee break Lenny Markus presented “Building for scale with KrakenJS”, he showed the PayPal example and gave us a tour of some of the libraries used in solving various problems and standardize the development of new projects: Yeoman, Lusca, Makara and Kappa. Then Jú Gonçalves talked about “Improving client-side apps' performance with Facebook’s React”.

The afternoon continued and James MacAulay presented “Promises”. One reason that is often put forward to learning a new language is to learn new programming concepts. Promises are one of these concepts. James gave a concise but effective intro on the subject with examples done in github.com/jamesmacaulay/kozu.

Federico Silva gave us much information about “Functional Javascript” in a short time, then Forbes Lindesay talked about “Promises and Generators: control flow utopia”.

Closing the first day of the conference Jeremy Ashkenas presented Backbone.js. Nice to reassure the power of simplicity contained in Backbone, some very useful and clear patterns from the creator himself plus an enumeration of philosophical principles of good design of a front-end architecture and turned to specific patterns to solve common problems.

The day finished at Seven Bar, where speakers and attendees mingled over drinks. Not even the rain could stop the spectacular turn out!

Second day

The day started with a lot of coffee and a great talk by James Halliday, “Tiny modules on the frontend: small modules with a single function." He showed the potential of a variety of small libraries for each specific problem. The most interesting one, which captivated the audience, generated music functions. Then Jean Carlos Nascimiento presented “Be MEAN," an interesting stack of Mongo, Express, Angular and Node.

After the break, we heard “JavaScript Security: myths, fallacies and anti-patterns” by Joe Petterson and then “MontageJS” by Benoit Marchant. MontageJS looks very interesting, and Benoit managed to instill curiosity and fascination in the audience.

After the lunch we listened to Zeno Rocha talking about “A future called Web Components," who was able to present this exciting topic with a lot of humor. After that, we learned about “Source Maps, how they work, and why you should care” with Thorsten Lorenz. The talk gave attendees a full understanding on how source maps work and hopefully inspired them to write more awesome tools that make use of them.

Then followed “Testing Sucks” by Leo Balter: When testing, we may take a longer path, but the results are a less breaking to unbreakable code. That afternoon Matias Woloski and Jose Romaniello presented “Death to cookies, long live JSON Web Tokens." They proposed a simple and secure alternative solution for authentication and authorization based on JSON Web Tokens.

After a break, Angel “Java” Lopez presented “Distributed Applications in Node.js," an exploration of distributed applications, using messages and distributed algorithms: messaging, queues, distributed actors, and other approaches. Leonardo Garcia and Sergio Gianazza talked about “Why Bacon is actually good for your health." In this talk, we saw what the Functional Reactive Programming is using examples with Bacon.js, one of the most popular libraries FRP.

Next, Nick Desaulniers presented “A merger of the Browser and Operating System”. The idea that Javascript is the future certainly took shape in this presentation. It is an interesting step in the eternal struggle between Native or Web in the mobile world, to develop apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Closing the conference, Douglas Crockford presented “The Better Parts." Douglas spoke a little about everything, but the most interesting part was his vision for the Language of the Future, as Javascript is not the ultimate language, and neither is JSON the ultimate way of representing data. He managed to captivate the audience with a good dose of humor and wrapped up with loud applause.

** The conference ended with drinks on the 26th floor of Antel Tower, which many called “The Drink-up in the Clouds” because of great nightime view of the whole city of Montevideo. **

Thank you very much to the organizers, sponsors and speakers for making this conference possible.