JS Nation

JSNation 2023

This talk explores the use of AI in web development, including tools like GitHub Copilot and Fig for CLI commands. AI can generate boilerplate code, provide context-aware solutions, and generate dummy data. It can also assist with CSS selectors and regexes, and be integrated into applications. AI is used to enhance the podcast experience by transcribing episodes and providing JSON data. The talk also discusses formatting AI output, crafting requests, and analyzing embeddings for similarity.

In this talk, we'll take a look at the growing intersection of AI and web development. There's a lot of buzz around the potential uses of AI in writing, understanding, and debugging code, and integrating it into our applications is becoming easier and more affordable. But there are also questions about the future of AI in app development, and whether it will make us more productive or take our jobs. There's a lot of excitement, skepticism, and concern about the rise of AI in web development. We'll explore the real potential for AI in creating new web development frameworks, and separate fact from fiction. So if you're interested in the future of web development and the role of AI in it, this talk is for you. Oh, and this talk abstract was written by AI after I gave it several of my unstructured thoughts.

AI and Web Development: Hype or Reality

Wes Bos

React Summit

React Summit 2024

Today's Talk covers native features in browsers, including upcoming ones and the Interop Project. Native features offer speed, compatibility, and improved debugging. Notable examples include dynamic viewport units, flexbox/grid gap, container queries, and motion path. The Interop Project ensures consistent web platform features across different browsers. Upcoming features like native CSS nesting and entry/exit animations are on the horizon.

Most developers closely follow the framework wars. So busy with these games, that we forget to check what new features HTML, CSS, and JavaScript offer us. Native modals, dynamic viewport units, and optional chaining are just some of the features you should use already! If you stopped following Web Platform development in 2015, it's time to refresh your knowledge. I will teach you to build applications tailored to 2024 and prepare you for the new Web Platform features that will appear in the coming years.

Webdevelopment Tailored for 2024

Andrzej Fricze

C3 Dev Festival

C3 Dev Festival 2024

The Talk focuses on providing debugging tools for human interactions in software development. It emphasizes the importance of soft skills in programming and suggests strategies such as depersonalization, giving a good apology, understanding power dynamics, emotional regulation, setting boundaries, and rupture and repair. It highlights the need to avoid a self-centered mindset and take responsibility for one's own actions and reactions. The Talk also discusses power dynamics in relationships and the importance of recognizing and navigating them. It emphasizes the significance of setting boundaries, prioritizing, and managing time effectively. Additionally, it addresses the importance of regulating emotions, showing compassion, and repairing ruptured relationships. The Talk concludes by encouraging the embrace of repair and revolutionizing human interactions in the software development field.

“Hell is other people.” There are many talks on how to get started as an engineer and how to step into management, but there are few talks about how to be an adult in (professional) relationships. I’ve spent my career in small companies and startups, FAANG organizations, and opensource communities. Each of these spaces demands different things of the people in them, yet across these spaces all succeed and fail along the fault lines of a core set of soft skills: regulating emotions, setting boundaries, framing experiences productively, and letting go. In this talk, I share everything I’ve learned in my career that has helped my colleagues, mentees, and friends so that you may navigate the most difficult part of tech—people—with grace, empathy, and safety.

Managing Ourselves Managing Each Other

Rachel Nabors

React Summit US

React Summit US 2023

This Talk discusses the journey from thousands of Lint failures to zero in a codebase at Linton that is over 80 years old. The approach involved implementing rules, incentives, and tooling to address the issue. The tool called Checkup was used to visualize ESLint failures by team and lint rule, providing accountability and responsibility. The efforts resulted in cleaning up over 6,000 lint failures, with 55 contributors, and a 30% increase in perceived code quality.

Lint rules enable us to uphold code quality and minimize errors. It can positively impact developer productivity and happiness especially when working in a massive application with multiple teams working together. But what if your large scale application contains thousands of lint failures over the many years it has been running in production? This talk will explore actionable strategies for effectively addressing lint failures at scale so that we can once again rely on lint rules to ensure consistent code quality and streamline development processes, leading to a more robust and maintainable codebase.

Road to Zero Lint Failures: Tackling Code Quality Challenges at Scale

Chris Ng

Setting up the system and separating concerns are important in software development. Modular construction and prefab units are a new trend that makes construction quicker and easier. Architectural complexity can lead to a drop in productivity and an increase in defects. Measuring architectural complexity can help identify natural modules in the code. Best practices for avoiding architectural complexity include organizing code by business domain and using prop drilling. Atomic design and organizing a monorepo are recommended approaches for managing architectural complexity.

Prop drilling is fine. Duplication is great. Long functions are love. We talk a lot about bad complicated code because it’s easy to see the problem. But research shows engineers can work around self-contained bad code just fine. What really trips them up is something else entirely – architectural complexity. Architectural complexity makes your code hard to work with, causes 3x more bugs, halves productivity, and may even cause devs to ragequit. In this talk we explore what you can do.

Forget Bad Code, Focus on the System

Swizec Teller

React Summit 2023

GitHub Copilot is an auto-completion tool that provides suggestions based on context. Research has shown that developers using Copilot feel less frustrated, spend less time searching externally, and experience less mental effort on repetitive tasks. Copilot can generate code for various tasks, including adding modals, testing, and refactoring. It is a useful tool for improving productivity and saving time, especially for junior developers and those working in unfamiliar domains. Security concerns have been addressed with optional data sharing and different versions for individuals and businesses.

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that can help you write code faster and spend less time writing repetitive code.This session will cover some interesting use cases for Copilot that could shine a light on its possibilities. This ranges from prompting Copilot to suggest a function based on a comment, learning how to use a new framework, tackling a security or accessibility bug, better documenting your code, translating  code from one language to another, etc.Agenda: Introduction to CoPilot - What is Copilot - How can you use it - How it can help you write code faster - Copilot Labs experimental features I will pick examples from the React ecosystem and show how we can fix Security Vulnerabilities and Accessibility issues in some components.

Improving Developer Happiness with AI

Senna Parsa

TechLead Conference

TechLead Conference 2023

This Talk discusses the measurement and interpretation of tech lead, focusing on tech debt. Tech debt is a tool to temporarily speed up development but can have negative consequences if not managed properly. Various tech debt metrics, including heuristic metrics and second-tier metrics, can help identify and manage tech debt. Tech debt interest is crucial for measuring the impact of tech debt and allows for prioritization. It is important to collect and analyze tech debt metrics to ensure software and team health.

Hardly any people in Tech like when there's a lot of tech debt. And most of us would like when there's not too much of it. But how do we understand how much exactly we have of it? Where exactly does it sit? Which part of it is actually the most annoying? What would be the benefit for us if we spend time getting rid of it? When it comes to planning how you tackle your tech debt, all these questions deserve answers. Especially when we're asked about the ROI on our efforts to eliminate some annoying legacy stuff and build a new shiny module or service. Also, when we work on tech debt, we do want to tackle the most impactful parts of it first, don't we? This talk is about all of that: how we measure our tech debt, how we interpret the results of these measurements so that they give us the answers to the right questions, and how we guide our decision making with those answers.

A Quick and Complete Guide to Measuring Your Tech Debt and Using the Results

Anton Kazakov

This Talk discusses the foundation, formation, and iteration of process, emphasizing the benefits and building trust. It highlights the importance of optimizing processes, using life cycles and meetings to streamline workflow and avoid mistakes. Exposing work through demos and documentation fosters collaboration and provides more exposure opportunities. The Talk also emphasizes concise communication, tailoring processes to individual team members, and addressing challenges through effective communication. Automation is recommended to save time and streamline workflow, while maintaining a balance with personal interactions.

One way to get a good groan from your team is to mention the word “process”. Engineers in particular worry that process will mean their momentum will get slowed or halted, and usually have experience to justify that worry. With an understanding of workflow and high-level individualization, this doesn’t have to be the case. As a tech lead and now manager that has converted many process skeptics, I’m excited to show you my processes for process.

Processes for the Process-Averse

Tara Z. Manicsic

JSNation 2022

The Talk discusses imposter syndrome and reframes it as being a professional imposter. It emphasizes the importance of sharing and starting, embracing imposterism, and building inclusively for the web. The speaker shares personal experiences of being an imposter in various technical disciplines and highlights the significance of accessibility. The Talk concludes with the idea of building a collective RPG game to remove excuses for not making things accessible.

You know what impostor syndrome is, right!? Most all of us have felt that nagging feeling that we're faking it and that we're sure to be found out by all the experts around us at any moment.But before you go assuming this talk is the same ol' song and dance full of platitudes that encourage you to ignore that syndrome, let me clue you in on a little secret: there's no experts around you. Impostorism is not a syndrome at all, it's a pragmatic mindset and perspective, one we should all embrace and be proud of. In fact, it's vital to us getting our jobs done.

Confessions from an Impostor

Kyle Simpson

JSNation Live

JSNation Live 2020

This Talk discusses the speaker's coding journey, forming habits, and finding time for coding. The speaker recommends participating in the 100 days of code challenge and learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AngularJS, and D3.js. Building small projects and games is helpful for learning and growth. The importance of forming habits and overcoming resistance is emphasized, along with prioritizing consistency and focusing on details. Finding time is about reclaiming the 24 hours we all have and making small changes to accommodate coding. Keeping a log or notebook is important for tracking progress.

In this session, I am going to share my story on how I started coding, how I make time to work on side projects and how you can grow and advance in your career. After this talk, I hope you'll be inspired to work smarter, make new habits and continue pushing yourself even when things fall apart. I will present some helpful tips about self-motivation, time management, setting priorities and goals, staying organized, believing in yourself and keeping a balance between your career and personal life. Additionally, in this session, we are going to talk about building the habit of coding and the benefits of it. We are going to explore ways of finding mentors in your job and outside of it and also expanding your social network. This talk is not only about getting better at your 9 to 5 job but also about developing yourself. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

When You Think There Is No Time for Learning or Coding

Eleftheria Batsou

React Summit 2020

Kent C. Dodds discusses the consume, build, and teach approach to learning and upgrading oneself in a software development career. He emphasizes the importance of consuming curated content, learning from others, and applying different learning methods. Kent shares his experiences in creating personal projects, building projects to understand technologies, and learning through projects. He highlights the power of teaching, the benefits of learning clubs, and the importance of balancing personal life and learning. Kent also introduces Epic React, his workshop-focused approach to teaching React. 

How do you level up? How do you jumpstart your learning when getting into something new? Nobody has more than 24 hours a day, so how do you maximize the impact of your limited time? In this keynote, I'm going to tell you a bit of my own story, and some tips and tricks that I've learned so you can be as productive as you can be at learning new things and solidifying that knowledge so it's there when you need it. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Consume ➡️ Build ➡️ Teach

Kent C. Dodds

JSNation Live 2021

The Talk covers various tips and features of using VS Code, including the command palette, Zen mode, external terminals, and debugging. It also highlights advanced editing and refactoring features, Git integration, and the use of dev containers. The speaker demonstrates how to set up a dev container for a Python app, run code in a container, and create and configure dev containers. The benefits of using dev containers are also discussed, such as eliminating manual configuration, handling dependencies, and facilitating team-based development.

How do you debug so easily in VS Code? How do codespaces work? What are those key combinations to edit code so quickly? What extensions are the ones I shouldn't code without? Get ready to hit the ground running in this fast-paced, demo-heavy talk that takes you through some of the best and most effective tips and tricks in VS Code. Learn how to setup your environment and customize it the way you like it. You'll walk out with several tips on how to be more efficient with one of the hottest tools on the Web today! <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

VS Code Can Do That!

John Papa

ReTool is a platform that focuses on building internal tools quickly. It offers easy integrations with databases and APIs, supports custom React components and JavaScript libraries, and provides extensive support and deployment options. Developers can try it out at retool.com.

Retool is a front-end as a service tool that is similar to React and can be 10x faster than coding a web app from scratch. We’ll focus on how and why it is used for internal tools at some of the fastest growing companies and take a minute to walk through how it works, where it’s a good fit and where it’s not. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

#productivity