Thunder Plains

At the intersection of computer science and statistics lies machine learning, using applied statistics as a framework to let your application teach itself how to recognize patterns. This talk covers everything from simple regression analysis to natural language processing to deep neural network learning. Learn how to take advantage of one of the most powerful tools in the tech landscape.

Underneath every breakout website or app is a horizontally scaling back-end, but how do we get from a single process Node.js server to a highly-available, auto-scaling system? In this talk, we’ll take a high level look at a full production stack before getting our hands dirty with the secret sauce: Node.js, WebSockets and Redis. Through a live coding demo, you’ll learn how to take a single-server app and scale it infinitely. Walk away with a better conceptual understanding of high-scale web systems and practical tools to start implementing these techniques in your own projects today.

There are over 5,000 online trackers that use cookies, fingerprinting, and probablistic device matching to follow you across the web. Some methods are actively used for fraud, malware, and intrusive user tracking. Some are commonly used for legit purposes. We'll talk about how sites are able to follow users, tracking methods both fair and foul, and how Mozilla protects users from tracking.

Reasoning about asynchronous code can be hard if you don’t understand the mechanics. It often trips up programmers with deep experience in other languages when they try their hand at client or server-side JavaScript. But, asynchronous JavaScript isn’t as hard as it seems once you learn a few simple rules about how it works. In this talk, we’ll dive into the mechanics of concepts that you might have had a chance to full grok. Let’s dispel this confusion once and for all. We’ll explore some metaphors that illustrate the difference between how synchronous and asynchronous code execute. We’ll dive into essential concepts like the call stack and the event loop to build a solid conceptual understanding of how the asynchronous model is implemented. Finally, we’ll take a good hard look at a number of common patterns for writing asynchronous code in JavaScript. We’ll start with the listening for events on XMLHttpRequest and build callback and promise APIs on top on it.

Making the web accessible to people with disabilities is fundamental to the web itself. An accessible web extends opportunities for learning, teaching, working and participating to a larger audience that traditionally faces barriers to access at every turn. You may be good with accessibility already. Some headings here, some alt attributes there. A good start. But how does that work on accessibility actually change things for people with disabilities? Part of the answer lies in testing sites and applications to identify barriers to access. Developing accessible applications is a lot easier if you can work some testing into your development workflow without adding loads of time or money to the process. This session will teach you how you can use a few tools and techniques to diagnose lots of barriers to access that your users with disabilities encounter. As you learn about some of the tools, you will also learn more about what makes the web more accessible.

This talk will discuss how to shift culture to give application security the attention that it needs and how to adopt a continuous security process for your team, one that isn't obstructive and annoying but enabling so you can write better, more secure software.

JavaScript is evolving quickly. The ES6 specification was released in 2015 and is quickly being implemented by modern browsers. New versions of ECMAScript will now be released on a yearly basis. We can leverage ES6 and functionality slated for future versions right now to write even clearer and more concise React code.

Experience with React will help you get the most out of this session, but you don’t have to have a JavaScript black belt to leave feeling confident in using ES.next with React. Learn how to write cleaner code using the new spread operator, classes, modules, destructuring, and other tasty syntactic sugar features being introduced into ECMAScript. Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t understand all of those terms — you soon will after this session!

You’re at the hip new Javascript party, chilling out with your friends when it happens. Everyone’s buzzing about the groovy new things in Js and you feel left out. Jenny’s into monads, Jimmy’s into tree shaking and Bobby Dreamboat won’t stop going on about streams and schedulers! OMG like whatever!

In desperation you dive into the freshy-freshest new file in town. Its written in React.js and its straight outta tha’ githubs. …But what’s inside of this file? This isn’t your grandpa’s JavaScript, its a zany new flavor but it reads like hieroglyphics to you! Where’s all the dollar signs? Say What?!?

Good thing you picked up this month’s issue of Javascript Beat! This issue, we’ve got the inside scoop on a hot new ensemble calling themselves “The New JavaScripts on the Block”. Its a tell-all backstage pass, and they’re loose lipped on their juicy new JavaScript secrets! They’re the new standard for modern Javascripting, and you gotta get in on these hot takes.

As a matter of fact, modern Javascript looks really different than even a few years ago. Download any boilerplate for a project and there’s a lot to learn to even get started! We’re going to interview each of the 5 band members, and learn what they like most about Javascript today. Kevin knows all about those quirky dot files in your project and Billy Bundler knows all about modern build systems. Jimmy Streamboat loves schedulers and stream programming while Johnny Lambda loves immutable functions and virtual DOMs! Mikey Monad can help us understand some of the funky ES6 code we’ll find in any hot new source file today, and don’t think of talking to any of these guys if you’re not familiar with modern unit testing strategies! As if!

It is a whirlwind tour of what-the-heck-is-even-happening in this hipster-written boilerplate making the twitter rounds right now. Don’t be left out! Meet the band and be the real center of attention at your next Javascript party!

For many years, the JavaScript community and academia regarded each other with a mixture of disinterest and disdain, but as JavaScript became fast and ubiquitous and the JS community tackled more ambitious projects and grappled with harder problems, this changed. This talk will survey the current landscape of academic research related to JavaScript: everything from automatically verifying the correctness of web applications to remotely triggering hardware faults in DRAM via JS. Along the way we'll learn where to find interesting academic papers about the web and how to read them.

JavaScript shows up in a lot of different places these days. Kassandra will explore many of these odd or interesting uses of JavaScript.