Anjana Vakil

Anjana Vakil

Anjana suffers from a chronic case of curiosity, which led her from philosophy to English teaching to computational linguistics to software development. As an internationally acclaimed public speaker & educator, her talks and courses on functional programming, JavaScript, and philosophical & linguistic perspectives on software engineering have reached millions of learners worldwide. These days she mostly codes & teaches from her dual home bases in the San Francisco Bay & Berlin, when not traveling (in a mask) to events around the world to speak about the joy of programming and advocate for a more equitable & ethical tech industry. Nerd out with her about programming paradigms, ask her about the Recurse Center & Outreachy, and definitely invite her to your karaoke party!
The Art of Functional Programming
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
26 min
The Art of Functional Programming
Functional Programming (FP), a paradigm in which programs are made up of pure, stateless functions, is adored by many programmers for how easy it makes it to predict, test, and debug the behavior of the code we write. Although FP has an unfortunate reputation as an ivory-tower domain full of obscure jargon comprehensible only to those with PhDs in category theory, the core concepts are straightforward ideas all of us can understand, and even have fun learning!
In this talk, we’ll create generative SVG art as a way to explore fundamental FP concepts such as recursion and function composition, and tackle the practical challenges of FP in the real world, such as dealing with the tricky parts like side effects and randomness which don’t fit into the safe, sterile world of pure functions. By the end of the talk we’ll not only have the key concepts & techniques we need to start writing our own functional programs, we’ll have some pretty functional art to look at too!
(Easier) Interactive Data Visualization in React
React Advanced 2021React Advanced 2021
27 min
(Easier) Interactive Data Visualization in React
Top Content
If you’re building a dashboard, analytics platform, or any web app where you need to give your users insight into their data, you need beautiful, custom, interactive data visualizations in your React app. But building visualizations hand with a low-level library like D3 can be a huge headache, involving lots of wheel-reinventing. In this talk, we’ll see how data viz development can get so much easier thanks to tools like Plot, a high-level dataviz library for quick & easy charting, and Observable, a reactive dataviz prototyping environment, both from the creator of D3. Through live coding examples we’ll explore how React refs let us delegate DOM manipulation for our data visualizations, and how Observable’s embedding functionality lets us easily repurpose community-built visualizations for our own data & use cases. By the end of this talk we’ll know how to get a beautiful, customized, interactive data visualization into our apps with a fraction of the time & effort!
Data Visualization for Web Developers
JSNation Live 2021JSNation Live 2021
139 min
Data Visualization for Web Developers
WorkshopFree
In this workshop, through hands-on projects we'll learn how to use Observable, a browser-based reactive coding platform, to rapidly build insightful, interactive visualizations in JavaScript. After completing this workshop, you'll have the basic tools & techniques you need to start using dataviz to better understand your code, your projects & your users, and make better data-driven decisions as a developer.