Forem: Kostas Mavropalias

My Top JavaScript Techtalks of January

Kostas Mavropalias — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 14:20:02 +0000

I hope you enjoyed my My Top React Techtalks of 2019.

Since I watch a lot of dev conference talks, I decided to follow up with monthly instalments of my top tech talks.

January was a quiet month, as far as dev conferences go. So, I had the chance to catch up with JavaScript conferences from 2019 and watch many interesting talks.

The following are my favorites:

1. Serverless can do that?!

As a frontend developer you might think - why would I even care about servers? 🤔 See how empowering serverless can be.

2. Staying confident without feeling like an imposter

"I often worry that my colleagues are smarter than me and one day they'll discover how incompetent I really am." Explore techniques to build confidence as a developer.

3. The HTML Treasure Hunt: from JavaScripter to Front End Superhero in 29 Minutes

How much do you know about HTML’s semantics? A co-editor of the HTML spec will take you on a magical treasure hunt around HTML.

4. 10 thing I learned making the fastest JS server runtime in the world

Top #10 things I've learned while putting JavaScript on the top of server-side benchmarks.

5. Future Ethics

Understand the moral challenges that lie ahead for technologists, and how to create more thoughtful, ethical products for future generations.

6. You Belong Here

Learn about the characteristics of thriving open source communities and how to create a healthy, welcoming community of your own.

7. Building Fast Angular Applications from End-to-End

Explore many of Angular features and improvements in the pipeline that allow anyone to build and deploy performant apps with very little overhead.

8. Controlling a swarm of drones with NodeJS

See how to control multiple drones using JavaScript. With the help of Node.js we'll send commands to the drones and read back their telemetry.

9. Immer, Immutability and the Wonderful World of Proxies

JavaScript Proxies are fun and powerful, but you should probably never use them! Learn why. Plus, see how Immer makes working with immutability easy,

10. Rust, WebAssembly, and the future of Serverless

Learn about Rust, WebAssembly, serverless technologies, and how it all fits together.

11. It’s My (Third) Party, and I’ll Cry if I Want To

Understand the performance impact of external fonts, analytics, ads, tracking, and more.

12. Oh, the Management Mistakes You Will Make!

This talk breaks down the transition from being a Senior Engineer at a company to becoming a new manager.

13. Testing Tools and Their Friends

Tools that supercharge unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, with a focus on Cypress.

14. Turbo charging 2D on the web

Learn the alternative ways of presenting 2D content in the browser (CSS, Canvas, WebGL), along with the pros and cons of each one.

15. Remembrance of Tags Past

In the 30 years since the Web's creation, the list of HTML tags has slowly grown. This talk is a fascinating journey through the evolution of the web and HTML.

Follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, for more JavaScript and React talks.

My Top React Techtalks of 2019

Kostas Mavropalias — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 16:46:49 +0000

Are you curious to know what happened in 2019 in the React world, that you should know about?

I watch a lot of dev conference talks. They're a great way to learn new things and stay up-to-date in my career as a developer.

In 2019, there were 23 React conferences—with ~500 talks (~180 hours)—and I covered all of them, on Hero35.

The following talks are the ones that I enjoyed the most, due to their fascinating content and/or high educational value, captivating delivery, and clear audio quality. I added a short description on each one.

1. Building mobile-first web animations in React

Learn how to create smooth, performant animations and interactions, that look and feel native-like.

2. React is Fiction

How many times have we used a design pattern, just because we’ve been conditioned to use it? Jenn gives a thought-provoking, interdisciplinary talk that questions our assumptions and challenges us to break the rules.

3. Using hooks and codegen

Tejas gives a compelling, real-world, case study of how TypeScript and GraphQL helped his company overcome issues with legacy code, iterate faster, and provide more value to their users.

4. Let's Program Like It's 1999

As the web turns 30, Lee takes us back to its inflection point in 1999, with PHP and the LAMP stack, followed by a journey of the abstractions, syntax, and mental models that brought us here.

5. Building the new Facebook with React and Relay - Part B

How does app performance look at scale? Ashley dives deep into the details of how they rebuilt Facebook.com and achieved super-fast rendering times and network transfers.

6. Building a Custom React Renderer

It is important to understand the abstractions that we use (watch “Requisite React”). This is a deep dive into React’s architecture. Watch Sophie build a simple version of React DOM.

7. Accessibility is a marathon, not a sprint

Learn how to get started with accessibility, with common tools, patterns and starter-tips. Brittany explains how our users actually need a11y more than we think, and shows how to make it part of our regular workflow.

8. React, Collaborate and Listen

Inspiring talk about the web as a platform, React and its community, their future, and inclusivity.

9. Building the Dark Mode of Your Dreams with Color Science

Information-rich talk on color science, with practical examples on how to design a dark mode.

10. Sacré Bleu! The Trials of Internationalising Your ẨṔṔŁîÇåŤḯṏÑ�

Everything you didn't know you wanted to know about internationalization. Design your app to be language, region, and culture independent.

11. Saving the Web 16 Milliseconds at a Time

This talk is all about performance, after the initial page load. Learn cool tips about animations, accordions, and more.

12. A Guided Tour of React Hooks

Excellent introduction to Hooks, for beginners.

13. Foundations of Design Systems

Comprehensive talk on design systems. Learn what they are and what it takes to build one.

14. Navigating the Hype-Driven Frontend Development World

FOMO. Fear-Of-Missing-Out. New libraries, JS features, framework versions… the list goes on and on. Kitze talks about pragmatism into the fast-paced world of app development.

15. Animating an SVG cat with React.js

SVG components are powerful. Elizabet shows how to prepare an SVG in Sketch, convert it to a JSX React component, and animate it with Framer Motion. It's surprisingly simple.

16. State Management with React Hooks

See how React state management has evolved over the years. Learn how to build an accessible To-Do app with useReducer(), useState(), and React Context to manage state.

17. Human React

React is a great tool. But what really matters are the people that use our apps and the ways we can enrich their lives. React is also a large community that we need to fight to keep it welcoming, diverse, and inclusive.

18. Weaving Tapestries of Code

Jen takes us on a ‪fascinating‬ journey though computer science's history and pre-history. Learn how weaving helped kick-start the computing revolution.

19. Off Balance: Interactive Storytelling with React

This is an advanced talk about SVGs, shapes, animations and orchestration. It is also a talk about architecture, abstractions and building tools that open up new possibilities.

20. Frontend Application Bundles: The Docker of Frontend

Glen gives a fascinating talk on container technology and how that translates to the frontend.

21. TypeScript: Seeing Past the Hype

Matthew shows concrete, pragmatic, examples of how TypeScript can help us write better code, refactor easily and avoid errors. He also shows the pain points of learning, and using TypeScript.

22. Scheduling is the Future

Raw speed is good, but not enough. A scheduler allows us to improve the perceived performance of our apps, despite its overhead.

23. The Untouchable Web

Rick demonstrates the difficulties of providing consistent interactions across platforms, and discusses where React Native space is headed.

24. Mind Reading with Adaptive and Intelligent UIs in React

What if you could predict user behavior? Smart UIs help understand your users, and adapt the experience around their personal needs.

25. MobX - The Journey

The creator of MobX talks about his journey with the library and open source, reactive programming, client-side state management and learning new things.

26. Requisite React

Kent talks about how important it is to understand the abstractions that we use (Hooks, Suspense, JSX, etc), if we want to level up our abilities, speed and skills.

27. Independent deployment of the frontend with Docker and Kubernetes

A real-life use case for micro-frontends and motivation for adopting them.

I share my favourite talks on Twitter and Facebook.

What is your favourite React talk of the year?

Introducing Hero35, the best way to find & watch techtalks

Kostas Mavropalias — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 05:47:44 +0000

Introducing Hero35.com, the best way to find & watch developer conferences and conference talks.

TL;DR:

Hero35 contains ALL 64 React conferences around the world, with their 1429 talks and 829 heroes (speakers) to a total of 594 hours of content. More conferences are added, as they happen.

We started with our beloved React and its surrounding ecosystem. More stacks—frontend, backend, machine learning, & mobile—are on the way.

All events & talks are neatly presented, organized, categorized, tagged, curated and searchable.

No time to waste? Check out the talks that I personally curate.

Looking for your thing? Check out all accessibility, CSS, GraphQL, MobX, NextJS, React Native, Redux, or TypeScript talks. These are only 8 of the 619 topics that we cover, so far!

In a discovery mood? Use the powerful search to find anything … “hooks 2019”, “react native performance”, “graphql”, “redux vs mobx”, “a11y”, "concurrent mode", "Dan Abramov" … you can search across all talk fields.

If you enjoy watching dev conference talks, you probably know:

How educational they are
How much they help us stay up to date with our favorite tech stacks

You should also know, how hard it is to:

Keep up with conferences. There are so many! Just for React, there have been 24 conferences in 2019 alone! 😳
Determine which talks are really worth spending our precious little time to watch. Only in 2019, there have been 359 React talks (151 hrs! 😱), and counting.
Find more talks from your favorite speaker across conferences, filter by topic, see what's popular, etc.

Together with @agalioti, we built Hero35 to solve for all the above, and so much more.

Hero35 came online on October 12th, after months of development, and is now in Alpha.

We have grand plans and we want to get the community involved as much as possible. Our hope is that you'll embrace it and help it grow.

You can sign up (free) to vote on talks, save them to watch later, get access to our confs & talks newsletter, plus so much more coming up (like a personal content feed that matches your favorite stacks/topics).

All members that sign up during our Alpha and Beta phases, will be eligible for free account benefits post-Beta (details to be announced during Beta).

🔥 Sign up & upvote your favorite talks: https://hero35.com 🔥

We'd LOVE to hear your thoughts, ideas, or feedback. Our Twitter DMs are open, or you can email us at hi@hero35.com. You're welcome to create a GitHub issue, if you find something wrong with the site or content.

Follow us on Twitter: @Hero35Official, @agalioti, @mavropalias. The @hero35official account tweets new conferences and curated talks.

Thank you!

PS: Why do we call it Hero35? We think that the people that dedicate their time to prepare and deliver conference talks are real community heroes. Thus, we named the site HERO35, in their honor.

PPS: If you're curious, Hero35's stack is: React, Nextjs, TypeScript, Firebase Firestore, Firebase Functions, Algolia Search. We spent a lot of time developing a powerful backend system, which allows us to add content quickly. The source code of the client app is available here: https://github.com/mavropalias/heroes (we don’t accept PRs, currently).