Fluent Conference Wins

June 4th, 2012


I just completed one of the best tech conferences i’ve ever been to – Fluent javascript conference in SF. O’Reilly did a great job of providing many opportunities to learn more about various facets of the javascript world. These include business, mobile, gaming, tech stacks, detailed in the very useful fluent schedule. There was also tons of buzz around web apps (code shared on client and server), backbone.js, node.js, among other things. It was well organized, with usually about 5 parallel sessions, and enough breaks to consolidate notes, meet other attendees, explore the exhibit hall, or just catchup with email. There was also a few organic meetups at night, but I did not make it to any of those.

I was happy to see discussion around business side of javascript, mainly due to the rise of web apps and HTML5. Even though javascript has been around for 17 years, only in the last few years has there been an explosion of js frameworks and libraries. This is partially attributed to mobile explosion, apple not supporting flash, and a really great dev community (yay github). With all these new tools available, companies can focus more on the bits they care about, allowing them to get new apps, features, and fixes in front of their users faster than ever. Web apps were a very popular discussion area, from the business and develpment side. Specifically two sessions highlighted this. First was how business are “Investing in Javascript” (pdf presentation by Keith Fahlgren from Safari Books. The other was by Andrew Betts from labs.ft.com, discussing the financial time’s web app which allows users to view content offline. Most people know that traditional newspapers are dying, but I liked how Andrew points out “newspaper companies make money selling *content*, not paper”. Also Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer from Walmart had a fun-to-watch Web vs Apps presentation (yes, its true, tech isn’t always DRY). The main takeway from them (which was echoed throughout the conference) was that web apps are better than native apps in most ways except one – native can sometimes provide a better user experience (but not always). Of course you may still want to build a native app using html5 and javascript, and there are 2 great ways that people do this, using Appcelerartor’s Titanium or phoneGap (now Cordova, apache open-source version). One of the coolest web apps I saw at the conference was from clipboard.comWatch Gary Flake’s presentation (better look out, pinterest).

For the uber techies out there, there were lots of insights on how companies successfully used various js libraries and frameworks (in other words, whats your technology stack). This is important to pay attention to, since not all the latest and greatest code is worthy to be used in production environments. You should think about stability, growth, documentation, and community involvement. Here’s a few bits I found interesting

  • Trello (which supports IE9+ only): Coffeescript, LESS, mustache templates, jquery/underscore/backbone
  • just.me: jquery, less, node.js
  • new soundcloud: infrastructure: node.js, uglify, requreJS, almondJS .. served using nginx. Runtime: backbone, Handlebars
  • twitter: less, jquery, node.js, more twitter tech stack
  • clipboard.com: Riak, Redis, NGINX, jQuery, Node.js, node.js modules
  • pubnub: custom c process faster than memcached and redis
  • picplum tech stack: coffeescript, backbone.js, rails 3.2.3, unicorn + resque, heroku postgres, heroku (nginx), AWS couldfront & S3
  • stackmob: uses backbone, mongoDB, Joyent and EC2, Scala and Lift, Netty and Jetty

Finally, here are a few other cool tech-related tidbits from the conference. There was soo much good stuff, this is not a complete list, but just a few highlights from my notes