Cascadia.js Day One Notes

CascadiaJS was a single track conference of 24 amazing speakers discussing the cutting-edge of JavaScript, web development and engineering culture over the course of 2 days in mid November. These notes are from the first day of the event and the accompanying talks are now online.

#Reclaiming the Web with peer-to-peer protocols

Tara Vancil

• Beaker browser is a p2p browser
• p2p.taravancil.com
• Does every computer need to store everyone’s data? Or does only my computer serve my profile?

#Augmenting the Internet with Browser Extensions

Shannon Capper

• From textio
• Cross platform api by w3c apparently
• Very good example of a presentation, nice slides, gifs, animations, “memes”, examples
• Don’t write site specific conditionals
• config object per site that lets you describe how a single site looks and gives a uniform api for the rest of your code base
• Don’t break the host page
• Be careful modifying the dom, could be especially bad for SPAs
• Use shadow dom to help with this???

#Hitchhiker's Guide to Web Standards

Dominic Farolino

• Tc39 and ecma standardizes only JavaScript the language
• W3c and WHATWG are the people who standardize the actual web APIs

#Why I chose to Modularize the Ducks in my React App

Lauren Lee

• Universal redux stores lets you move components anywhere in the application without breaking prop chains passing down state
• Demoed organizing your redux architecture by type (the common, standard way)
• Ducks is another way of organizing your code by redux module instead of file structure (group action, constants, and reducer for each pairing into a single file)

#Lessons in WebAssembly: Client Side Video Editing

Megan Slater

• Built client side “native” video recording/editing app for ChromeOS
• Not possible in Native JS, what language to use instead? Wasm?
• Can convert rust as well as c/c++ to wasm
• Why to use WASM? Performance, adding other functionality not present in web
• Emscripten is the buildtool for WASM that does c/c++ to wasm. Similar to Babel.
• Emconfigure is a cli tool that lets you substitute emscripten to replace standard C++ build pipelines so that we can create a wasm compiled c library
• Check emscripten website and other experts to build wasm libraries for you, we’ll probably just import wasm libs and wrap them in JS

#SPA at Scale

Patrick Woo

• AWS employee
• Applications need to consider how actual users will use the app, slow machines, old OS, slow network, etc
• Lighthouse chrome extension!
• Documentation is pivotal and hard!
• Used typescript to help with documentation, made code “self-documenting”
• Storybook functions as a single source of truth for the design team to work with the developers, rather than random files bouncing around
• Use tests! Confidence, faster onboarding, prevent regressions
• testingjavascript.com
• Monitors and alarms allow you to ensure production is working as intended (deployments, dependencies, other things you rely on outside of your tests)
• YAGNI - you ain’t gonna need it
• Get feedback early and often

  Be kind, rewind

• consider the people who are going to be following after you. Show empathy for the people you work with.

#Building a Culture of Learning and Growth

Tre Ammatuna

• Cultural learning - how groups of people pass info to each other faster than lone individuals
• Only 31% of employees only actually engaged in work, this number increases to 65% if people learn something same day

  What happens if we train them and they leave? What happens if we don’t and they stay?

• Lunch & Learns! Lightning talks! 3rd Party Talks! Learning Stipends! Libraries! Mentorship programs! Conferences! 20% time! Deep dive days!
• Consume > Build > Teach - Kent c Dodds

#Down the Rabbit Hole with WebVR

Shannon Foster

• AR art gallery demo
• WebXR is the thing now, not WebVR
• Lots of cool XR demos

#Creative Coding & Opening Up Open Source

Elgin-Skye McLaren

• Child computer interaction and tangible computing (computing and its relation to physical objects)
• Creative coding - arts-based and inclusive

  You don’t need to be an artist to be an artist.

• D3.js, three.js, p5.js
• P5.js Community statement - “everyone is welcome here”
• Friendly machine learning for the web website
• Very cool machine learning/p5 demo

#Creative Collaboration: Building a Universal Design System

Julie Busch

• Built a large system to support all brand sites of Condé Nast, but gave each individual brand site a configuration file on JSON
• How???
• JSON! Compiled JSON files of “style tokens” into SASS functions that dynamically build your css
• Atomic design!
• Had designers create a tokenized template instead of a single .psd. They’re the ones building all the brands anyway!
• Gave a single team access to the JSON files, and only let consumers use an API or SASS functions

#Open Source and the Volunteer Workforce

Michale Lange

• From CIVIC (Hack Oregon)
• Org Charts keep contributors organized
• Conways Law - anything your organization makes is a product of your org
• If you build it, they won’t come
• Hindsight bias makes popular projects seems like they’re destiny
• Recruiting!
• Ask what your community offers the members?
• Autonomy, mastery, and purpose
• Product management is for everyone
• Vanishing point as a product management goal, things nearby mist be clear and well defined, but what you see in the distance is small and hazy and might change
• Lower your expectations!

  Slow and steady is so much faster than not moving at all.

• Write the docs, docs are asynchronous and don’t block volunteers while they wait on you
• Be proactive with your Diversity and Inclusion
• Be open about your values
• Write rubrics for all assessments beforehand
• Have 1:1 meetings with people and listen
• This is ongoing work
• Apologize, reflect, and be better

#Secret Talk

Yehuda Kats

• In 2009 Specs are written for people who write specs, not for web developers using them.
• How to fix this? Try to give standards team a ton of feedback that web devs want more. 200+ more responses
• Among first web developers (who actually build websites) to join tc39 via being registered jquery non profit.
• Joined w3c technical architecture group
• Moved documentation of specs onto GitHub
• The extensible web manifesto - tighten feedback loop between standards writers and web developers
• Lots of developers from all sorts of parts of the ecosystem on tc39 now
• Chrome is now involving framework developers in intent to implement features in the browser

  We must enable web developers to build the future of the web.