Videos are out!
Via play and Confetti have uploaded all the talks and interviews from Nordic.js. The full list can be found at nordic.js’ youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/nordicjs/videos. But we thought we’d give you some quick tips on what talks to watch and why. So here is Alexanders’ and my list of the top talks of Nordic.js 2014, best first:
Douglas Crockford – The Better Parts
It is about the evolution of programming languages and programming style, with examples from JavaScript and JSON.
Alexander – Read his book several times, it is sort of the eye opener when it comes to writing better javascript. He is always interesting to listen to, always technical and usually comes with some new insight – now he doesn’t use “this” anymore, with good reasons.
Jonas – Hight expectations delivered upon. I have watched Douglas’ video series from his Yahoo days, “Crockford on JavaScript”, several times and still the real deal is even better. Controversial, forward thinking and provocative, this talk is, no huge surprise, number one on my list.
Sergi Mansilla – The fourth dimension
In the spacetime model, the fourth dimension is time. In this talk I will show how to transform and manipulate events happening in different moments in time the same way that we transform Arrays or normal sequences, by using the power of Functional Reactive Programming. This will allow us to unite synchronous and asynchronous code, in a way that will help us reason about complex code and build applications that are powerful, reliable and simple to understand.
Jonas – I had seen uses of the reactive programming model before, without really reflecting on it. This presentation serves as a really nice introduction to the model if you have never seen it and a point of reflection if you have. This will not be the last time we talk about it …
Alexander – Reactive Extensions (rxjs) in this case is a very interesting approach to get out of callback/promises hell, and certainly a breath of fresh air. It was interesting to hear more about it.
Hakim El Hattab – Visual JavaScript Experiments
I have a long running passion for creating interactive and animated content for the web. In this session I’ll walk you through some of my favorite projects ranging from particle simulations to games, UI concepts and open source libraries. Specific techniques will be highlighted as well as the thought process that led up to the sometimes seemingly arbitrary final results.
Most importantly, I’ll try to get you excited about experimenting with different forms of visual coding on the web!
Alexander – This guy is an artist, a visual artist. It was very interesting to see his personal projects, not to mention that he used his very own tool, slides.com, to create the presentation for his talk. And he talked about that same tool amongst other things.
Jonas – I have been following Hakim’s work for years and find his experiments and design sense a constant inspiration. To see him speak about his processes and even get to hook up after the talk was amazing for me. Some really nice content on creativity and how to dimension you projects to a manageable size.
Tom Dale – The Road to Web Components
The web is abuzz with excitement for Web Components. Is it just hype?
In this presentation, I’ll talk about how Ember’s Components bring many of the features of Web Components to developers today, and provide some real-world examples of how components have made Ember developers more productive.
Lastly, I’ll talk about how Web Components can bridge the worlds of Ember, Angular and Polymer to create an ecosystem of reusable components that can work across libraries and frameworks.
Jonas – Seeing since the web components draft looks really interesting and there isn’t that much material out about it yet this talk is an excellent introduction to the concepts, applications and polyfills for web components.
Alexander – While I am not personally a big fan of Ember.js, Tom Dale is a great speaker. He had some interesting news to share about the Ember framework family.
Reginald Braithwaite – The Art of the JavaScript Metaobject Protocol
JavaScript’s prototypes are a simple and elegant way to represent a very simple form of inheritance in an object-oriented program.
In this talk, I will introduce examples of semantics from other programming systems, such as mix-ins, singleton meta classes, aspect-oriented programming, and heterogeneous inheritance. We’ll then see how to build these semantics in JavaScript using prototypes.
At the end of this talk, we’ll see that JavaScript’s prototypical inheritance is an excellent tool for building the precise inheritance system you need.
Alexander – An interesting discussion about different kinds of inheritance, how to modularise your code and how semantic versioning may pollutes your code and how to fix it.
Jonas – Reginald’s intense personality coupled with a very enticing idea made for a great talk. One of his core points, about looking again at our refactorings and design patterns and seeing how we can apply them in different ways, is very thought provoking. It left me wanting more at least…
Robert Nyman – Keynote: Five Stages of Development
This talk will cover different challenges and experiences that we go through during different stages when developing, and try to make us think about our approach for how we solve problems. It’s a learning story based on own experiences and with concrete advice and examples.
Jonas – Writing the keynote for the first instance of a conference can not be an easy task. Robert might not have written the most controversial keynote ever but it’s good content. He presented some very nice points on how to turn to data driven decisions when developing software when he described how Mozilla revamped it’s development process for the Firefox dev tools.
Alexander – I know I know, Firefox… But they are really trying to improve their own dev tools, and in fact they have some neat features that Nyman spoke of. I think perhaps they suffer from bad marketing, which is what Nyman wants to remedy.
Thats it. Enjoy the talks and feel free to tell us how wrong our selection was in the comments below 🙂