In the amount of time it would take to have a pizza delivered, I'll teach you about accessibility through JavaScript testing. By using a pragmatic approach to software quality, we can create a more inclusive Web. Take it from someone who has broken high-profile builds: you can win by automating tests for common accessibility problems and catching them before they are deployed out into the world.

What do you do when you only have a few regular attendees? Is your own schedule so crammed you can't sustainably present every topic every month? Do you still want a local user group? Some hard won experience from a local web developer meetup co-organizer. Or, how we kept the user group going and helped foster continued growth in attendance and participation.

Who in their right mind would ever want to work with RDBMS anymore. Especially in JavaScript, where you can just call "save" on your JSON and turn it into web-scale BSON, or get to choose between so many levels of DB that we don't even know which to use. This will be a story about one person's journey to try and make people believe that Node can actually be a thing for boring, early-2000's era web applications using (gasp) SQL. It'll also share some discoveries along the way including how ACID / transactions can be super useful in the everything-async world of JavaScript, and some tips and tricks for keeping a sane and organized data layer when venturing into the abyss of hybrid single-page / server-rendered applications.

I made the open source project Babel and will be presenting on how JavaScript transformation and ES6 can help improve developer workflow and how it can futureproof their code. Not only transpilation to ES6 but how Babel has support for Flow, JSX and React so it can be integrated into many workflows extremely nicely. There are many challenges associated with transforming JavaScript as well as AST manipulation that I think would be extremely beneficial for the average developer to know about. There's even crazy stuff like transpiling proxies/Object.observe which wraps every single expression in a method.

Javascript has always been a language with very little syntactic sugar—for better or worse. With ES6/2015, and future iterations,though, Javascript is gaining a more and more abstract and expressive syntax. To some it might appear that our language—which already seems accessible and approachable for beginners— is becoming even more accessible and approachable. However, both the humanities and CS education research have proven that abstraction, while a powerful tool for knowledgeable practitioners, can be an equally powerful foil for beginners. As we enter the era of language-level abstractions in ES6/2015, we are charged with the task of rethinking how we teach JavaScript. Through an interdisciplinary montage I will identify the problem of teaching abstraction as a ubiquitous demand across nearly every domain, and align the issues of creativity and critical thinking in the humanities with issues in computer science. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the discipline of computer science and that of the humanities can inform each other to produce more effective and creative solutions to both developing and teaching abstractions.

Have you ever wanted to make those 8-bit sounding tunes from your childhood? What better way to do it than using the actual hardware to get that classic sound? Oh wait. I have to learn some archaic assembler? Not anymore! Now make those classic sounds from your childhood with JavaScript. This talk will go over the basics of how sound works on the NES, and how we can use JavaScript to make music on the NES.

Currently there are ES7 features proposed for async programming that have never been seen in a programming language before. If accepted, these proposals could allow entire JS applications to be written without a single callback! By providing the same level of support for async functions as regular functions, ES7 could dramatically alter the way everyday developers write code. Imagine reading data from a stream or a web socket with a simple loop. Imagine catching async errors using try/catch, and never again finding yourself in the callback pyramid of doom.

What actually happens when your code is run? Our programs are simple text documents composed of patterns of rules, but the processes they guide aren't nearly as well behaved. Function scopes are generated, data is plumbed through pathways, bits are shifted and applications are evaluated. There's a lot of ins, a lot of outs. It's a very complicated case. We can gain some insight into the process with console.log and step-through debuggers, but we're left to develop a full program simulation in our minds based only on the code we wrote and the tiny snapshots our debugger gives us -- effectively requiring a JS interpreter to be compiled into our wetware. This can make it somewhat challenging to reason about our work. We'll look at some ways of remedying this, starting with basic data structures and tiptoeing toward full programs. Your code is the DNA for a process: let's build an illustrated anatomy guide.

CSS has a number of deficiencies: no namespacing, dependency management, code isolation, or robust dead code elimination. It also has confusing cascading behavior and no way to share logic or constants with front-end code. We've created various hacks and alternative languages to resolve these issues, but the best solution has been right under our noses: JavaScript. By using JavaScript and its ecosystem, the require() module system gives us namespacing and dependency management, existing tools like UglifyJS can eliminate dead code, the confusing cascading behavior of CSS can be bypassed completely, and shared logic and constants can be written in one place. Take it a step further and we can polyfill CSS features, calculate critical path styles, and perform other mad science.

JavaScript is everywhere, but too often it's locked in computers and phones. We need to bridge the gap between the physical world and your computer... It's time to alter the world around us with JavaScript! In previous JSConf talks Jan Jongboom ripped mainboards out of phones; abused sensors; and juggled devices, but this session is going to be harder, deeper, higher and more crazy! How about procedural music generated by the sensor data of all members of the audience? Using bluetooth beacons to find out if the person next to you is worth talking to? Hardware hacking your Firefox OS phone to add more sensors? Geofencing your newborn with a phone mainboard? And all of that... with JavaScript! Loaded with demo's this talk will forever change the way you think about JavaScript in the real world. LET'S DO THIS!

When you weren't looking, someone stuck a synthesizer into your favorite web browser. The Web Audio API is widely supported and makes it easy—and more importantly, fun—to create, process, and control audio in the browser. We can spin up oscillators, adjust gain, tweak frequencies, and slap on some funky delay. Additionally, we can also take existing sounds and manipulate them to our heart's content. We can grab input from cameras and microphones and use them as we see fit. But, the fun doesn't stop there—we still have the rest of the browser's media APIs at our disposal. We'll talk a little bit about the Web Audio API. We'll explore the browser as a vehicle for creative expression. We'll fire up some audio contexts and connect some nodes. We'll also leverage the getUserMedia Web API, WebSockets, and others to build unique musical instruments that could only be possible in the web browser. We'll not only talk about the API itself, but also some of the fundamental concepts for working with audio and making music.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding The siren song of the dialup modem that summoned AIM and the Book of Mozilla has a language unto itself. In this talk, we’ll learn how to implement an end-to-end frequency-shift keying modem, capable of sending and receiving data between computers using the Web Audio API. By using a browser, I’ll provide an interactive session detailing how we can use javascript to encode and decode what modem tones really mean.

The formula for a Bezier curve is beautiful. Using sine and cosine to create orbiting objects is dazzling. L-systems create fractals through elegant simplicity. Developers, as a group, may be losing site of the beauty that code can create. Designers by the bunch are picking up a keyboard and creating amazing pieces, but it's happening the other way very slowly. That's a shame, because the computer lets otherwise unexpressed ideas go unexplored. Developers have the ability to embrace the art of programming and the art of art because of the myriad frameworks available. Use the language of your choice to make some art, whether it’s in the browser or in the physical realm. Walk away with the confidence and the inspiration to put down the work for a minute and pick up a digital paintbrush.

Growing up in the '80s wasn't as cool as it's made out to be. As a teenager of that decade, we not only lacked any reasonable fashion sense, we lived under the constant shadow of nuclear oblivion. In hindsight, the arms race begat some huge advances in computing theory and practice, and since your average mobile phone is more powerful than that era's entire North American early warning system, makes a great target for simulation. Cold War is an in-browser recreation of the nightmare that was the '80s, exploring emergent systems, the limits of Javascript performance, and some techniques that might actually be useful in your day job when you get back to civilization. Expect vector graphics, high altitude bombers, missiles, killer satellites and explosions. More than a few explosions. And unlike the '80s, lasers that actually work.

Through out history, JS has been pointed out as the villain when the matter is accessible websites. By presenting some tricks and techniques, we plan to provoke this discussion among developers, and show that Accessibility and JS may live together, as long as you take the right steps.

Making the mobile web platform better, both for ourselves and for the next two billion users, is one of the most important challenges of our careers. It's not enough to rely on standards organizations and browser vendors to solve our technical and cultural problems. We've got to do more. I'm going to take a look at solving problems such as performance, routing, and offline experiences by circumventing the DOM, building hybrid Android apps, and using persistent background queues. Not that these approaches will solve all your problems – but rather, help you set new benchmarks, give greater clarity and direction to the bugs you file on browser vendors, and ultimately get you better results. By making bold technical decisions, we move the web forward. Instead of improving and optimizing the problematic paradigms/assumptions under which the web was built, we should borrow patterns from other mobile platforms or invent new ones. We also need to understand how the experience of coming online for the first time will be very different for the next generation of primarily non-North American mobile users.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could "print out" your own javascript generated bitmap art as a knitted scarf ? Well, you can ! Knitting textiles is a lot like programing computers. You write your knit pattern (code), your brain compiles it, and your hands render knit stitches (1s) and purl stitches (0s). It means you can decipher knitting nomenclature like "k2, m1L, k1, m1L, k until 3 sts remain, m1R, k1, m1R, k2" into JavaScript. This talk will cover how you can program knitting patterns in JavaScript and then use an electronic knitting machine from the 1980's to make beautiful knitted textiles.

With the amazing performance of modern single threaded JavaScript how can we catch up in parallelism? Today’s hardware provides specialized instructions that can operate on data in parallel and provides multiple execution units that can run code in parallel. The single threaded nature of classic JavaScript cannot take advantage of these resources. When quad-core smartphones are already available today that leaves a lot of performance potential on the table. I will share work we are doing to extend JavaScript with flexible and powerful primitives for parallelism that will unlock new performance opportunities to the Web. Let’s explore how native code concepts like shared memory and execution synchronization could work in JavaScript. With great power comes great responsibility so I will touch on some mitigation strategies we have in place to make sure tomorrow’s web applications stay well behaved as they use all the horsepower your hardware can provide.

I’m starvin’. I throw open my laptop, and search by what I've got in the house to minimize me running to the store. I'm craving a flavor, not necessarily a cuisine. Some southern food has its origins in West African food. How do recipe searches address this? How do we combine curation of good recipe content with better search to avoid having to build a recommendation engine? In this talk, we’ll take a look at the current state of web recipe discovery and how I naively tried to come up with an alternative with brute JavaScript force and graph-databasing; like baking a souffle for a dinner party and doing a no-fall dance before it comes out of the oven. Plan for the worst and be delighted when it doesn’t happen(or chuckle when it does)!

JavaScript is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, used by virtually all web applications. Learn the basics with this focused introduction to JavaScript Fundamentals. From variable types and functions to scope and prototype chains, you’ll gain a solid understanding of the language and a firm foundation for creating real world applications while writing clean, maintainable JavaScript.

In this intensive training segment, we’re going to get you started developing in Node.js. We’ll build a small application that serves a static webpage, has dynamic routing, and interacts with a third-party API (maybe even of the NodeBot variety...?). No knowledge of Node.js necessary, though a knowledge of JavaScript is a good thing to have for this training.

Coming soon, in a theater near you. It’s bigger than Ultron. It’s better than Ultron. It’s more ubiquitous than Robert Downey Jr. It’s ES6, JavaScript’s next in-your-face revsion. You’ve never seen a sequel, until you’ve seen this. I’d like to take you all to the movies. Explain to you all about ES6, and what new features are accessible now, even in older browsers or node.js. You’ll see what we can access with a single new script tag. I’ll also go through many of the features that are “transpilable” and explain what that means. I’ll even go so far as to say why some don’t like the word “transpile” at all. It’ll be an excuse for me to get into the fun and tangled web of compilers. The goal of this workshop will be to give everyone a taste and experience of the future JavaScript features that we can all use with only a few tweaks to our current processes.

Debugging is one of those things that (almost) everyone despises, but that absolutely every software developer needs to know how to do. Over the past fifteen years, Brian has worked through some of the weirdest, wildest bits of JavaScript, and has the mental scars to prove it. In this deep dive, come and absorb some of his knowledge on how to debug all the things! We'll be focusing on the front-end mostly, as that's more commonly where the weirdness happens. We'll explore devtools in various browsers, as well as use of tools like proxies to help figure out what the heck is wrong with things.

Why is React.js a game changer in a world with so many UI frameworks? We'll have fun learning what makes React.js special and uncover its simple core concepts. As we continue our journey, we'll apply our React.js skills to building some reactive web apps. You'll emerge from this workshop knowing the basics of React.js and will be ready to use it for your own projects.

OS X and Linux are two very popular operating system choices for web developers but they still want to be able to test Internet Explorer and the new Microsoft Edge browsers. In this talk, we'll discuss the state of browser marketshare, the options available for testing these browsers on OS X & Linux and new tools that offer enhanced testing capabilities for mobile browsers

Continuous integration ensures software's health with each each codebase change, ideally via automated tests and other quality-assurance processes. Tools like Phantomjs offer a great path towards headless JavaScript testing, but what about those scenarios where the software under test requires an actual GUI web browser? Think NW.js, Flash, and Google Polymer web-component-tester. X Virtual Frame Buffer provides an excellent solution towards lightweight, headless testing against real web browsers. In this talk, I'll offer some background on X Virtual Frame Buffer, and demo how to test a Google Polymer web component on a lightweight Ubuntu VM in continuous integration.

In this talk we’ll look take a look at WebRTC, a rather new technology that is giving Javascript developers the tools to add real-time communications features to their applications without the need for plugins or learning a new language. We’ll examine the key components of this standard, look at how peer to peer connections are established, and discuss how you can start adding features like video calling and screen sharing to your applications today using the Respoke Javascript library!

Closures are undoubtedly the most powerful feature JavaScript inherited from its Lisp forbears. But would JS be so powerful… without them? We’ll reimplement closures entirely from scratch without the convenience of native local variables or function parameters. Entirely in JavaScript. Using prototypal inheritance, some clever hat-tips from graphics programming, amnesic function bodies, and this one weird global variable.

In this talk we will explore signal processing, specifically how our brain interprets sound. We will explore some of the basic theory behind how music is digitally encoded and look back at some of the history and science behind the western musical cannon.

A dive into how the Relay framework makes it simple for developers to implement mutations (data writes) and real-time updates.

Where is my train? When is my next talk? Is now a good time to use the restroom? Pebble is a device intended to give you constant access to the tools and data that matter most without having to dig out your phone. In this talk we will show off how easy it is to start programming data driven applications for Pebble with just a few lines of JS.

Lessons from the intersections of organizational design, human psychology, and business in order to better organize ourselves, our projects, and our communities.

This talk will introduce the idea of working with both Dom + GL in a single co-ordinate system.

What are web components and why you should be using them. Find out how to get started and how Comcast is using Polymer for customer facing applications.

Why we wrote our own framework to deliver high-performance UI updates and fast server-side rendering within our existing tech stack.

Have a large Backbone application that you'd like to try React on with the hopes of moving away from Backbone in the future? I'll guide you through some of the options and techniques you can do so without going crazy.

Whether you work on open source or are hiring developers to work with you, first impressions matter. The first day on with a project is both exciting and challenging for any developer. From missing documentation, unknown dependencies, complex codebases and install processes, it’s a wonder that most people don’t just quit on the spot. However, when a plan is in place and when things are handled correctly, the first day with a codebase can become one of the most motivating days for any developer.

Our semi-yearly episode of NodeBots:Live! We'll have so much to talk (and dance) about! Want to be on the panel? Let me know: the@nodebotani.st

Learn about how browsers/engines leverage JavaScript to implement built-in APIs. Knowing @jdalton there's likely going to be some performance bits too.

At WalmartLabs, we like to automate-away all our boring and tedious work, so we can focus on the fun stuff. But automated cross-browser end-to-end testing is really really hard to get right. We'll show you how we did it, and unveil some open source tools we're releasing to help with your zombie apocalypse, too.

Introducing NemoJS (http://nemo.js.org, https://github.com/paypal/nemo), a test and task runner agnostic selenium wrapper - with confit (https://github.com/krakenjs/confit) for configuration and a plugin architecture for precise customization and modularity.