Building a Better Web
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

Developer Experience Track: Tools, Platforms, and Techniques

Good customer experience begins with developer experience. When your team is able to make the best technical decisions to make your app or site work for your customers, you’re able to ship code better and faster. Whether it means getting up to speed on new browser features and developer tools, adopting a new frontend framework, or evaluating serverless cloud platforms, there’s a lot to gain from sharing best practices and case studies from different communities across the web stack.

9:00am–9:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Architecture and microservices
Location: 212 A/B
Rachel Myers (Google), Emily Nakashima (Honeycomb)
Average rating: ****.
(4.71, 7 ratings)
Specialization among engineers and increasing levels of abstraction have created a situation in which almost no one has a complete view of how data moves through an entire system, end to end. We’ve all become distributed systems engineers, intentionally or not. Rachel Myers and Emily Nakashima detail tools and skills we can use to get ourselves out of the corner we’ve boxed ourselves into. Read more.
9:00am–9:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 210 B/F
Sasha Aickin (Self-employed)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 5 ratings)
WebAssembly has been hailed in some quarters as the next JavaScript, but the truth is much more complicated. Sasha Aickin outlines what WebAssembly is good for right now in today's shipping browsers. Through the lens of a project ported from JavaScript to WebAssembly, Sasha details when it is practical to use WebAssembly and when it is not. Read more.
9:00am–9:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Frameworks and Libraries
Location: 210 D/H
Cory House (Pluralsight | Cox Automotive)
Average rating: ****.
(4.55, 11 ratings)
Creating React components is easy. Designing and publishing truly reusable React components is hard. Cory House shares lessons learned from creating a library of reusable React components at Cox Automotive. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Browsers and Frontend Tools
Location: 210 D/H
Burke Holland (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 4 ratings)
Visual Studio Code is catching fire with JavaScript developers because it can do a lot, from productivity tips to debugging Docker containers on the fly to hacking the editor itself. Join Burke Holland to explore the best features and extensions for VS Code that nobody ever bothered to tell you about. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Architecture and microservices
Location: 212 A/B
Thomas Bouldin (Google), Sarah Allen (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 5 ratings)
Modern backend architectures increasingly stitch together loosely coupled services through event-driven pipelines. Thomas Bouldin and Sarah Allen explain how “stackless” programming can free you to build applications faster that scale more smoothly. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 210 B/F
Kyle Shevlin (Formidable Labs)
Average rating: ****.
(4.58, 12 ratings)
Functional programming is all the rage these days, but with lingo like "lambdas," "functors," and "monads," it can be intimidating to get started. Join Kyle Shevlin to learn just enough functional programming for you and your team to get started without getting lost in the vernacular. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Web services and APIs
Location: 210 C/G
Peggy Rayzis (Meteor Development Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.22, 9 ratings)
GraphQL is a new API technology that has exploded in popularity over the past year. But what's all the hype about? Peggy Rayzis details what GraphQL is and explains how integrating it into your application can solve many of the pain points frontend developers face when working with remote data. Read more.
11:00am–11:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Web services and APIs
Location: 210 D/H
Gergely Németh (GoDaddy)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 2 ratings)
Gergely Németh outlines the evolution of a Node.js application from a proof-of-concept implementation to a mature, prospering product that earns revenue and scales to millions of customers Read more.
11:00am–11:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Martine Dowden (Andromeda)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 3 ratings)
With over 40 possible values for the display property, it's no wonder that CSS can be tricky, especially for layouts. Martine Dowden offers an overview of the display property and demonstrates how to use it to lay out content. Read more.
11:00am–11:40am Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Mobile and Desktop
Location: 210 B/F
Houssein Djirdeh (Rangle.io)
Average rating: ****.
(4.20, 5 ratings)
We’ve become accustomed to developing complex applications with powerful desktop and laptop machines. Unfortunately, this emphasizes how slow the mobile web is. Houssein Djirdeh offers an overview of the PRPL pattern, explaining what it is and how you can use it to build fast and reliable progressive single-page applications for users on any device. Read more.
4:25pm–5:05pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 212 A/B
Natalie Qabazard (Trulia)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 5 ratings)
For years, developers have relied on browsers to render web pages client side, which often leaves users patiently waiting for web pages to load. This less-than-favorable experience can be changed by writing user interface components in React. Join Natalie Qabazard to explore the pros and cons of rendering a web page server side using React and a serverless resource. Read more.
4:25pm–5:05pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Browsers and Frontend Tools
Location: 210 D/H
Brian Holt (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.60, 10 ratings)
Your app is bigger and slower than it needs to be. Brian Holt demonstrates how to squeeze more performance out of your code without rewriting it by tweaking webpack and Babel. These tools are immensely powerful, but it’s a delicate dance to get them to play nice. Join in to learn the tips and tricks you need to get there. Read more.
9:00am–9:40am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Aimee Knight (Built Technologies)
Average rating: ****.
(4.25, 4 ratings)
All too often developers are left completely puzzled when the browser renders CSS in ways they didn’t expect. But it’s not dark magic; we know that computers are just parsing our instructions. While many talks discuss how to fix common bugs, Aimee Knight focuses on the reasons behind them, leading a deep dive into browser internals to see how our styles are parsed and rendered. Read more.
9:00am–9:40am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Frameworks and Libraries
Location: 210 D/H
Hassan Djirdeh (Shopify)
Average rating: ****.
(4.43, 7 ratings)
The ability to create Vue.js components as small decoupled units of functionality is necessary for the organization of Vue.js applications, and parent-child and sibling-sibling components must be able to interact and manage information. Hassan Djirdeh explains why it's important to have appropriate state management for the predictability and maintainability of an entire Vue.js application. Read more.
9:00am–9:40am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 210 B/F
C J Silverio (npm)
Average rating: ****.
(4.44, 9 ratings)
Until now, JavaScript has not had an official module system defined as part of the language, although it has had several unofficial ones, including Node.js’s CommonJS module system. Join CJ Silverio to explore JavaScript's new module system, ES modules, and learn how your tooling and workflows will need to change in response. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Web services and APIs
Location: 212 A/B
Tara Z. Manicsic (Progress)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
There is a lot of talk about progressive web apps these days, but what apps actually need to be progressive? Maybe users don't need a push notification every time you post a picture of your pet. Tara Manicsic details what kinds of apps really benefit from the advancements of modern web technologies and walks you through spinning one up. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 210 B/F
Tracy Lee (This Dot)
Average rating: **...
(2.36, 11 ratings)
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could copy 90% of code between frameworks? You can with reactive programming. Not only can it ameliorate JavaScript fatigue, but concepts remain consistent across frameworks. Learn how to create composable app architecture with RxJS, a DSL on top of JavaScript. Read more.
9:50am–10:30am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Mobile and Desktop
Location: 210 D/H
David Neal (ReverentGeek)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 4 ratings)
Want to leverage your web skills to build cross-platform desktop applications? David Neal offers an overview of Electron, an open source solution designed to make building great desktop applications easy. Join in to explore Electron's features and learn how to quickly get started. Read more.
11:00am–11:40am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Sebastian Golasch (Deutsche Telekom)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Once there was the "video" tag, but content distributors decided it wasn't enough. They wanted more—more power, more protection, more control—so encrypted media extensions were born, and digital rights management appeared in our browsers. Sebastian Golasch walks you through the technical details behind EMEs, CDMs, and DRM by reverse engineering and building a Netflix video player. Read more.
11:00am–11:40am Thursday, June 14, 2018
Future JS and Functional
Location: 210 B/F
Bryan Hughes (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 9 ratings)
Interested in TypeScript but aren't sure where to start? Like most modern web development, it can feel like there are too many options and no obvious answers. Join Bryan Hughes to learn best practices for integrating TypeScript into both Node.js and webpack + React/JSX workflows, discover how you can benefit from the features TypeScript offers, and find answers to your TypeScript questions. Read more.
3:35pm–4:15pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Architecture and microservices
Location: 212 A/B
Ivan Jovanovic (NearForm)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Nowadays, applications have become incredibly big and complex, and most of the app lives on the client side. It’s becoming very hard to maintain those apps, and we often create more bugs than we fix. Ivan Jovanovic explains why the micro-frontend (a microservice-oriented architecture on the frontend) might just be the solution you need. Read more.
3:35pm–4:15pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Web services and APIs
Location: 210 B/F
Alex Banks (Moon Highway)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Instead of allowing our phones to make us oblivious to the world around us, what if we were able to use them to facilitate interactivity in the real world? Alex Banks details (and invites you to participate in) interactive challenges that use the power of GraphQL to create graphable relationships, covering the code that produces each activity and the data produced by the activity itself. Read more.
4:25pm–5:05pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Web services and APIs
Location: 212 A/B
Bobby Johnson (Auth0)
Average rating: *....
(1.00, 1 rating)
Alexa, Amazon's voice-controlled assistant, is incredibly easy to build for. Bobby Johnson walks you through building Alexa skills for the sole purpose of having fun with your kids. Read more.
4:25pm–5:05pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
Mobile and Desktop
Location: 210 B/F
luis Vieira (Farfetch.com)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Luis Vieira offers an overview of the current progressive web app (PWA) landscape and explains how to leverage new APIs such as client hints, service workers, and network information to create PWAs that are highly adaptive to users' devices and contexts and that can offer a tailored and optimized experience that accounts for each device's unique characteristics. Read more.