Saturday, September 21, 2013

JSConf 2013: My Favorite Talks

I was fortunate to attend JSConf 2013 this year. I was a speaker in their training track, where I had fun giving a workshop on Backbone. Shout out to HackReactor teachers Marcus and Tony for being my super helpful TAs.

When I wasn't workshopping, I got to enjoy some amazing talks from a wide array of speakers. They're now all available online, so here's a list of my favorites:

  • Nicole Sullivan: Creating Living Style Guides: Nicole explained how she worked with Trulia to refactor their CSS, work out performance issues, and create a style guide. You'll come away wanting to have a style guide for your site, if you don't yet. Khan Academy has a basic one here, and even though it doesn't cover everything, it's already helped me to avoid making up new styles.
  • Rebecca Murphey: Optimizing for Developer Delight: A talk on engineering team culture, communication, tools, documentation, and best practices. A great one to watch particularly if you're a tech lead or manager.
  • Angelina Fabbro: JavaScript Masterclass: A talk that's more about becoming a better developer and approach to learning than about JavaScript itself. I love her philosophy so much.
  • Seb Lee-Delisle: CreativeJS - making art in the browser: Seb couldn't attend because of Visa issues, but he made it work over remote video. And yeah, normally you'd think a remote talk at a conference would be horrible, but it was amazing. Since he couldn't hear us for whatever reason, he made us wave his hands to show our applause or laughter or agreement, and that made it more interactive than the in-person talks. And Seb was generally awe-inspiring with his ability to make creative programming look easy.

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