Archive for the ‘conferences’ Category:

Fluent 2013

September 14th, 2013

The Fluent conference this year was just as good as Fluent 2012 last year, and bigger and better in some ways. I still loved how at then end you walkaway realizing how popular, important, diverse, and interesting javascript still is. I want to echo what I said in last year’s post, that I love seeing javascript used to solve real business problems, but the conference was much more than that.

Here are some of my highlights from the few talks I attended out of the 80-ish talks across 8 Topics: Doing Business on the Web Platform, The Server Side, Front End Frameworks and Libraries, HTML5 and Browser Technologies, Mobile, Pure Code and JavaScript, The Leading Edge, Tools, Platforms, and APIs

Noteworthy Speakers

  • Paul Irish – Google Chrome Advocate / Wiz [Wed 9:45a]
    • Insanely fast with chrome and sublime.
    • Talked about workflow, similar to 2012 (editor, browser, etc)
    • Chrome workspaces (in canary) – maps local files to what chrome gets over network
  • Sylvain Zimmer (french guy, scraping sites) [Wed 4:15p]
  • Eric Elliot – Adobe – [Wed 5:05p]
    • Classical Inheritance is Obsolete: How to Think in Prototypal OO
    • npm install stampit (stampit on github)
    • Classes deal with the idea of an object, Prototypes deal with the object itself.
  • Ariya Hidayat – Sencha – [Thu 11:50a]
    • Code quality tools are very important for good software dev
    • Feedback is important: tools <–> engineer
    • CI server, build tools, editors, code testing, code coverage (istanbul)
  • Sarah Mei – Pivotal – [ Thu 2:35p]
    • Emphasized importance of team communication ==> good code
    • One study said biggest predictor of good code was (in order)
      1. team communication, more so than
      2. tech qualifications
      3. experience with code base
    • Great book (for js, too): “Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer” by Sandi Metz
    • Loves pair programming.  good speaker
  • Brian Rinaldi (Adobe Systems)
    • NodeJS is more than just server js – offers lots of command line tools: UglifyJS, Grunt, GruntIcon, JSHint and HTTPster
  • Nick Zakas
    • Say Thank You.   author of 4 books.  Good speaker.

Other Takeaways

  • Websites need fast page load
    • About 250ms is google’s max page load time
    • 1000ms is max time users wait before mental context switch
    • 2000ms delay on bing/google SRP made 4.3% drop in revenue/user (HUGE)
  • Improving page load
    • Tie performance improvement goals with biz goals
    • Test your site with google’s pagespeed
    • Render Above The Fold (ATF) ASAP – inline critical css, logos, so browser can render at least part of page fast.
  • SPDY
    • HTTP 2 today, avail in chrome, ff, opera (no IE), apache, node, nginx
    • Requires TLS (HTTPS)
    • Many big sites adopted in 2012: some google, facebook, twitter, wordpress, cloudfare
    • Really only need 2 domains to serve images (google says 10 images is enuf)
  • Refactoring JS – lots of tips
  • Games
    • asm.js is da shit (runs C code in js)
    • Brendan Eich (Mozilla) demo’d game “Unreal”, ported to js/html5
  • Google Glass
    • Android, like TV. camera, geolocation
    • Simulator on github, mirror API
    • Avail in 2014, $200-$600