A day at JS World - Guest Post

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at JSWorld Conference in Amsterdam. A colleague of mine, Martijn Gribnau, was also there for the day.

He wanted to try his hand at blogging, I think it's awesome that he's done that and so I'm pleased to say that he's made a guest post for me.

His story is below! Martijn, it's been a pleasure helping you with this, over to you!

JSWorld Conference

Hosted in Amsterdam on 1 june 2022, the JSWorld conference was specifically targeted for frontend developers.

Ever wondered how many frontend developers can fit in one room?

Over 1000… That's right in this conference there were over 1000 developers in a single track event. I happened to get hold of a ticket to join the JSWorld Conference on 1 June 2022.

Arriving at the nice venue (Amsterdam Theater) was a warm welcome. Enough coffee to start the day with an excellent choice of croissants and other delicious starters.

After talking to some people, my colleague Stacy Cashmore tapped me on the shoulder. She was about to present that morning. After getting some “give-aways” we were directed to the main hall to get seated. The day was kicked off with a warm welcome and the first speaker walked on the impressive stage (with uplifting introduction music).

Sessions

A session about “Deno”, the talk started off with comparison with Node and after a while I figured it was a good alternative for running applications in Node. It seems the adoption rate of Deno is “sky-rocketing” next to the adoption of Node, so it should be worth to watch how Deno evolves in the near future.

Currently the 1.0.0 version is scheduled for Q3 in 2022, so there is only stuff to play around with. More background on Deno can be found here. (Oh… also note the shuffling of the letters Node to Deno… not a coincidence, it is both developed by the same guy)

CSS Houdini

If you are very good as CSS, this new evolvement will rock your world. This technique enables you to influence the changes in CSS (e.g. animation) on a whole different level and on a different thread than the main JavaScript thread. Backgrounds can be found here.

Building your brand using Azure Static WebApps, one step at a time

The session hosted by “Stacy Cashmore”. In her session she took the audience on a voyage to develop in Azure Static WebApps and create a webapplication within 25 minutes, for free!

A combination of Blazor WebAssembly static content with Azure Functions joined together inside of an Azure Static Web Wpp was demonstrated, even with Authentication. This opens a route to develop web application on the free (or low-cost extended version) of Azure Static WebApps. It was also the first session of the day with a lot of real-time coding during a presentation. This was very appreciated by the audience, even when GitHub was returning a “Error 500” during the presentation. Stacy handled these difficulties like a real “pro” and fell back to previously worked out examples to make her point across.

More can be found on Azure Static WebApps Authentication can be found right here

Time to recharge

After this session we were invited for the lunch - which we got to by the stage screen openning up and everyone walking through to the room behind!

With hotdogs, hamburgers and other delicious food. A short break at the coffee bar boosted my energy level for the afternoon sessions.

Designing high performance React Applications

Was an experience story from a Senior Software Engineer at Uber. He explained their tactics and resolutions to problems you encounter when your webapp is used globally with a gazillion users.

Serverless and deploying to the cloud from VS Code

Hosted by Natalia Venditto was an excellent talk about using VS Code, the new Azure CLI and the abilities of using Bicep to provision environments in Azure. Unfortunately she had technical difficulties during her talk, but she recovered brilliant with the phrase “close your eyes and imaging a picture I have on the screen”. She kept her coolness during the technical difficulties of the talk and the whole audience gave a standing ovation afterwards. More can be found on AzureCLI and Bicep here.

The Evolution of Javascript

Hosted by Jemima Abu, was a very entertaining loopback (especially for StarWars lovers) on the evolution of Javascript. Did you ever know that there were 2 buttons in your browser, saying “view this in Netscape” or “view this in Internet Explorer”? The browser and JavaScript have come a long way since 1995 and her talk explained every milestone on the way. The talk finished with “currently JavaScript is the biggest thing in languages to develop your application….what’s next??”. It raises the proper questions on where to look for the next evolution on the web, …. Is it JavaScript?

Storybook embedding

Was a talk about the specific product Storybook. Did your company develop frontend “Components”…and did it get out of hand? How many components did you develop, are they consistent and can you test them properly? Storybook can help with all these questions. More about Storybook can be found here.

Takeaways

Overall it was a very inspiring day to take back to the workfloor and discuss with my colleagues. I gained some new insights in tooling and solutions to problems we also deal with in daily life. And especially cool to see your own colleague walk on that stage, address 1000 people in the audience and do a killer presentation. I take my hat off for Stacy Cashmore!!!

We can certainly take a look at Storybook to inventorize and unittest our frontend components in a structurized way. "Deno" might replace Node in the end and we will keep track of the development of this new technology.