I’m just back from an amazing couple of days hanging out in Melbourne at Web Directions’ Code 15 Conference. Awesome selection of local and international speakers talking all things JavaScript & Front End Engineering.
Coming from the Java Enterprise Dev background, this isn’t my really home space, but I’m so pumped about what I’ve been experiencing in Node.js land that I had to go and check out what the thought leaders are doing in the Front End space. It was nothing like what I’d expected, but it was totally awesome! And I’m so jazzed about the future of the web!
Super diverse crowd, but all super pumped.
So, what’s the new black?
There was lots of talk about React. Lots. I had no idea it was collecting so much mind share of the cutting edge. But once you wrap your head around the benefit of a Virtual DOM, it became clear why so many people are pumped about it.
After watching Mark Dalgleish demo some of the things his team at Seek are doing, I was super impressed. A rich application, all with JavaScript turned off. Crazy good!
You should definitely go check out his presentation on the “Dawn of the Progressive Single Page App“. The possibilities of server-side React, augmented by client-side React, really are a new kind of Nirvana. No most waiting for a first impression.
React is the biggest upgrade to the DOM since jQuery. Talking about the future of the DOM without looking like a React fanatic is hard work.
— Mark Dalgleish (@markdalgleish) June 28, 2015
And what else were people talking about?
It’s all about ES6. Everyone who was demoing anything, was demoing it in ES6. They were using Babel to transpile everything back for older browsers, but all the examples were full of fat arrows, generators & iterators, modules, promises and let/const galore. Service Workers are also certainly a thing. Web Components too.
And everyone was linting. Boy, were they linting. “Let the robots yell at you”. In fact, they were ESLint-ing to be more precise. I love the catch-cry of “The point is to make life easier by automating it away”. And while we were improving quality, Elijah Manor delivered a great talk on JavaScript Code Smells. Lots of take aways there!
Accessibility was huge. To my shame, I knew almost nothing about screen readers or the accessible web design space. But there were talks about ARIA tags and the tooling to help you get things done properly, and accessibly.
HTTP/2 is here, and there was a bunch of discussion about all things old being new again. Animation is still super hot, and what you can do in modern CSS transitions is just wow!
Anyways, huge contracts to John Allsopp for an amazing conference. Can’t wait till next year!
In the mean time I’m off to write my first React app…