Intro to Angular 2

This workshop will start from scratch and walk you through how to develop an Angular 2 application. We’ll cover how to build components, forms, services, and how all the various pieces fit together. You will walk away with a solid foundational knowledge of Angular 2 and be comfortable with starting your own app or contributing to a team.

ReactJS Workshop

React is without doubt the most exciting JavaScript framework nowadays. It may not yet be the most popular, but its foundations are so strong that even competitors like AngularJS and EmberJS have taken notice and are in the process of adding features that were first popularized by React. It was open sourced by Facebook and Instagram, and in the two years following its announcement, it has gained adoption by many important web sites, including Khan Academy, Airbnb, Hipchat, Netflix, at an ever growing pace.

React is both easy and simple to learn and use. After learning a few core ideas, building complex web interfaces rapidly becomes almost trivial. In this workshop, we will be learning ins and outs of React and at the end of become ready to use React in our existing and new projects. One of the major selling points of React is that it lives happily with existing technologies so that one can transition to React in an existing application piece by piece, rather than committing to it fully and we will see how React makes this easy.

One of the most important reasons React has become popular has been its speed. In this workshop, we will go over this issue and learn about virtual DOM which makes React this fast, but most importantly we will see that speed is actually not the biggest selling point of React. We will argue that speed of development, simplicity and ease of reasoning about code written with it is of utmost importance and we will observe how thinking in terms of isolated components makes building UIs effortless and designer friendly.

<input>, I love you, but you’re bringing me down

Browsers have had native DOM elements since the dawn of time, and yet any time you talk to web developers about it, everyone complains about them. Key events are bananas. The <input> element is unpredictable and grumpy. Have you ever tried to fill in one of those credit card forms where you can’t figure out what format the phone number should be in? Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. Forms? Forms are magic, and not in a good way. Web Components let you stand up to browsers and build your own DOM elements that work the way they should, and Polymer is a new library that makes it easier than ever to do this.

Building the Physical Web Together

Today, every smart device in your home has it's own app. That's fine if you have 2 or 3 but what if there are many more? If we believe in Moore's law at all, the number of smart devices is going to explode, not just in our homes, but in our work and in public spaces. Apps are fine for things you use everyday but what about things that you just once, like a poster, or a vending machine? We are trapped by apps as they are too much work for a simple 'walk up and use' scenario. We need an open standard, one based on the web to allow any device to have it's own web page. This talk will show how this standard is being built and we, as a community need to make it happen. It will also discuss how transformative this new standard will be as allowing any device to have it's own virtual notecard of information opens up entirely new product concepts.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or How to Read the Internals of React.js

A significant part of the life of a developer is spent gluing other people’s code together rather than writing their own code . This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we use more robust, more flexible, and maybe even faster software. However, when the honeymoon stops and the library does not work as expected, the time spent debugging might exceed the time we would have spent had we written things ourselves. A major reason for this is that most developers only use libraries, yet don't read them. Reading and understanding other people's code is an important virtue every developer has to obtain. Could Dostoevsky be the author he was had he not read Pushkin? Can we reach for the skies if we don't understand how the giants we are standing on the shoulders of work?

Mortimer Adler, editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, outlined the rules of reading other people's work in his influential book "How to Read a Book". Reading code is different. It is neither as linear nor as polished as the edited version of a book. It seems more like a random walk rather than a guided journey. Can we do any better?

This talk proposes to do what Adler did for prose; outline the principles of reading other people's code, using React.js as an example. We will dive into the internals of this exciting user interface library by Facebook that has transformed how people are doing web applications over the last couple of years.

The web is getting pushy

The battle between native and web rages on. The browsers are fighting hard to tear down the benefits that native developers have relied on since the inception of mobile platforms. Geolocation, sorted. Accelerometer, done. Performance, we'll come back to that. But one of the greatest draws for native developers has been push notifications, for the web, email alerts just don't cut it.

But now, new in browsers for 2015, is the Service Worker. Born out of the struggle to make the Appcache work for offline capable sites it has also brought the advent of push notifications to the web. Through building up an example application live we will see how to implement the Service Worker to not only serve up an app when we're offline but enhance the online experience with push notifications.

The battle may continue, but the web is definitely pushing back.

Falling in Love with Forms

Forms. Without them, the web would not be what it is today, but they are challenging from a markup and styling standpoint.

In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including

* new HTML5 field types;

* validation, error messages & formatting hints;

* how to mark up and style forms for the greatest flexibility in responsive designs; and

* best practices for enhancing forms with JavaScript.

There Are No “Buts” in Progressive Enhancement

Progressive enhancement sounds practical, but not for your current project, right? Good news: you’re wrong!

In this session, Aaron will debunk the myths that often preclude individuals and organizations from embracing progressive enhancement and demonstrate solid techniques for applying progressive enhancement in your work.

By the end of this session, you’ll walk away with

* a better sense of the devices people are using to access the Web,

* a framework for envisioning experience as a continuum, and

* a solid understanding of how to improve the accessibility and reach of your Web projects.

Come find out why progressive enhancement isn’t just for “content” sites (whatever those are).