Speakers

Anyone who thinks Brendan Eich invented JavaScript has probably never read Oscar Wilde. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” says Algernon in Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, thus betraying a wary familairity with our favorite language. It turns out JavaScript's highly expressive nature and the infinite posibilities of its syntax made it a favored medium for our literary forebears.

Last summer I introduced the concept of Literary JavaScript with If Hemingway wrote JavaScript, wherein five famous writers demonstrated their JavaScript smarts. That article generated very positive reactions from both the JavaScript and Literary communities (including write-ups in the New Yorker, Huffington Post and Wired Magazine) and this talk will build on those themes, drawing parallels between the myriad stylistic facets of JavaScript and the kaleidescope of literary genres. There is a serious aspect - I hope to demonstrate that JavaScript's loose structure and lack of boilerplate encourages creativity and is something to celebrate rather than something to WTF about.

Oh, and as an added bonus I'll be unveiling an additional set of recently re-discovered works of literary JavaScript genius.

It is time that news stories told with JavaScript get recognized as a form of journalism. It took years for photo journalism to get the recognition it deserves, now it the time to recognize JS Journalism.

Most news organizations presented election news using JavaScript. News home pages often have more JS than text.

A bit of history. A bit of academia. A bit of current news. A few guesses about the future. But nothing about the future of newspapers.

JSON is the lingua franca of the web. Postgres supports JSON natively and the PLV8 Javascript engine as an extension. Full Javascript is supported inside the database, including direct access to tables and important database features.

And, developer-friendly features make it incredibly easy to transform your existing, normalized schemas into liberated JSON ones!

Tour of what putting a document store inside of Postgres looks like, including a look at a production use-case from Mozilla. crash-stats.mozilla.com is backed by a 2 TB Postgres database cluster that's adding about about 5 GB of JSON per week.

Digital Signals Processing (DSP) is inherently essential to any signals-based field, be it digital audio effects, computer graphics, or computer vision. The web has just begun it's foray into accommodating for DSP, becoming increasingly equipped to handle and modulate signals with the advent of technologies such as the Web Audio API and WebGL. With the basic DSP tools provided by these technologies, we are minimally bootstrapped and able to leverage these tools to implement powerful algorithms and incorporate powerful fields of research. One such application is the modulation and processing of music signals. In this talk I will focus on an application that is more complicated than it seems: automatic BPM detection of music. Due to the complexities of how we as humans perceive sound, parse harmonics, and "feel" beats within a song, BPM becomes a challenging and enthralling problem to tackle. I've just begun to embark on an endeavor to implement BPM detection in javascript, building upon budding DSP tools in JS and pulling from algorithms hardened by academic research. I have been digging into academic research papers in the field identifying and categorizing plausible algorithms from simple to complex, separated by effectiveness for differing applications. I hope to implement a number of these algorithms across this spectrum and compare their effectiveness for different kinds of music and applications. I believe exposing and providing robust algorithms for BPM detection would be a strong tool and asset towards many javascript-based web (and server-side ;D) applications, whether for categorization purposes, or for something more dynamic like music visualization.

I first began my investigation into BPM detection as a way to break music visualization out of its frequency rut to reflect more compelling metrics such as BPM & key, which encode our consumption and perception of music in a different way. I plan to use my implementations to build out music visualizations that use alternative metrics in a compelling way that reflects (or invokes!) how we emotionally react to the music we listen to.

Godwin's Law for JavaScript: as people discuss a proposed extension to JavaScript syntax, the likelihood of someone saying "Stop trying to turn JavaScript into Java!" approaches 1.

For years I've tried to understand this perspective. Why are there so many people out there for whom present-day JavaScript is Good Enough™? What crucial aspect of JavaScript's identity are they trying to defend? Why do they get so scared when someone suggests new syntax? Can we figure out how to evolve the language without incurring the wrath of their pitchforks and/or torches?

I'm going to spend half an hour trying to figure it out, and I invite you to join me.

JavaScript has a yin and yang, or put another world-religion way, it serves two masters: humans who hand-code apps and libraries, and compilers that generate JS as virtual machine code. No language can serve two such masters for long. Consider C, still hand-coded, used only as a target language "temporarily", a la early C++'s cfront. Which one will win with JS? I think hand-coding is closer to God, make no mistake, but I'm concerned about the case that mammon will prevail in the longer run.

In this dystopia, hand-coding will die hard, but compilers can out-generate humans and relieve programmers from having to learn and use JS, especially when they know and prefer another language, and definitely (as in the case of 3D games) when they have C++ code to port. Just as in the story of John Henry vs. the Steam-Powered Hammer, a noble human may get ahead in a sprint, but end up dying after the finish line from a burst heart.

I will present demos of compiled-to-JS programs including 3D games. I'll then do quick dive into the asm.js (http://asmjs.org/) subset of JS generated by Emscripten, and the OdinMonkey all-at-once asm.js compiler built into Firefox's SpiderMonkey engine. I will also present near-term extensions for data and task parallelism in JS. Finally, I will discuss code size and memory use, and sketch how hand-coded and compiler-generated JS can be linked together and share references into one anothers' heaps.

I am not an expert developer. I am also not a beginning developer.

I'm an intermediate developer, and I want to navigate the path from being a mediocre or good developer, to becoming a great or expert level developer.

How in the heck do I do this?

The tutorial ecosystem of the web is heavily skewed towards beginners, but what about the rest of us?

If you identify with these statements in the slightest, then this talk is for you. With ideas from cognitive science, education, and some advice from admired programmers along the way, we are going to explore what it means to be a world-class developer and what we need to do to get there. I'll talk a little bit about the philosophy, attitude, and habits (both good and bad) required for learning how to learn better, and then we will talk about the kinds of skills and knowledge that an expert programmer in general needs. Along the way we'll touch about various myths and cognitive biases about who can and cannot be a great programmer, and leave you with a path to get started. By the end of the talk, I will have proposed a curriculum of topics that should take an intermediate developer and turn them into an advanced one, and special attention will be given to mastery of the JavaScript language.

I will cover basics on how the Kinect works, some comparable hardware and how it differs, and finally a few solutions to get the Kinect working with your Javascript/HTML based webpage along with working examples of skeleton tracking, gestures for your application, and more.

or: "The underpinnings of a modern day web Application". A quick, fun (and educational) look back over nearly a decade of Javascript evolution. Where we are now, where we started, and the mess of nonsense that happened in between.

Seb is known for his engaging presentations and this will be no exception. He'll be showing how recent developments in browser technology have opened up a wide range of new creative possibilities. Expect demos, live coding, and amusing technical failures.

Earlier this year, I sat down with 25,000 lines of code written by a team of variously experienced developers in the crucible of a non-negotiable deadline. I didn't have a list of features to add or a list of bugs to fix; my mandate, as more and more developers were trying and struggling to contribute to the project, was to focus on developer happiness. From simple improvements like adding asserts and logging, to major changes that touched a scary-large portion of the repo, this talk will take a look at what we did to make a large codebase easier to understand, what we still need to do, and what you should start doing on your own project as soon as you get back to work.

One of the best-slash-worst-slash-best-again things about JavaScript is its ubiquity on both sides of the client/server model. In this talk, Jed will talk about the useful biomimicry seen on each side of the web ecosystem: in client-side servers like Browserver and Chrome TCP Listen, and server-side clients like JSDOM and PhantomJS.

When asked if I wanted to build a Chrome Experiment: a thing that shows off some of the new technology coming to browsers - of course I said yes! Then promptly I bit off the biggest bite of tech I could get my hands on: WebRTC, two way video, peer connection API, orientation events, CSS3 animations, Three.js: generally a lot of tech I didn't really understand!

This talk is about the experience of working with WebRTC for video & data streaming and creating a game with embedded video. How some of the problems I encountered blew my schedule to pieces and perhaps how I could have done things differently.

Spoiler: WebRTC may actually be more of a mindf**k than AppCache.

Can style guides lead to better UI code? Better performance? Yes, absolutely. In this talk, Nicole will show you how she and her team collaborated with Trulia engineers and designers to create a living style guide. She'll also share some yummy data about how that affected real user measurements.

Recompilation of running JS without having to restart it. It's like Bret Victors talk, when he demo's rewriting code (http://vimeo.com/36579366 , for example at 5:45). I'd like to show a working proof of concept of this as well as demo other parts of his talk that are up'n'running, and how you'd go about coding something like that.

So a crazy nerdcore JS rewriting and tooling talk. Guaranteed to blow peoples minds.

Once upon a time, there was a roboticist. She spent eight years working with robots of various shapes, sizes, and intelligence levels - her specialty was in planning and navigation algorithms (useful for driverless cars, rescue robots, etc.). Eager for some fresh air away from the lab, she switched gears and started developing a better Internet with JavaScript and Node.js.

In her time away, however, her little robot friends have also learned JavaScript! The likes of Johnny-Five and NodeCopter have breathed new life into those traditionally Python/C++-controlled machines, and our favorite roboticist's little vacation has come to a close.

Whereas 2012 was the start of moving, reactive robots programmed in JavaScript, 2013 will be the year of the smarter, autonomous robot! Task-driven and data-oriented, they will be the most intelligent JS robots you've ever seen - and they'll be the founders of the robot.js of tomorrow.

In this talk, we will discuss and review examples of not only what is possible, but also what traditional roboticists will have a hard time acknowledging: JavaScript is not only a legitimately viable language for robots, but also a fascinating opportunity to solve problems that can't be solved with Python/C++ alone!

The modern graphics card is a massive parallel computer, capable of pushing dozens of gigabytes of data per second through its pipes. And now with WebGL, you have the keys. To wield that power properly, you need math and lots of it. In this talk we'll explore what makes modern 3D graphics tick, how realistic shader effects are made, and how I learnt to stop worrying and love linear algebra.

YayQuery was voted in as a speaker through our alumni callback process, they are currrently finalizing their talk/show description. Stay tuned or check out their previous episodes!