In this report Sjoerd Valk (@Sjoerdus) and Martijn van der Wijst (@vanderwise) try to sum up their experiences in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
They stayed in Cluj during the 17th and 21st of April to attend the JSHeroes conference, a frontend conference all about JavaScript.
Presented by heroes of the JavaScript open source community.
Although most of the speakers admitted they weren’t really heroes, the very last speaker gave his talk in a hero-esque costume.
This year marks only the second edition of JSHeroes, but it’s organized really professional.
Speakers are from all over the world, and the location is a chique hotel.
A few kilometers out of the city center.
Its grandeur reminds us a bit of the Grand Budapest Hotel.
The name too by the way: the Grand Hotel Italia.
On Wednesday we followed an Angular Masterclass.
Thursday and Friday are the JSHeroes conference days.
The talks are just 30 minutes each. A quick pace and quite diverse topics.
The popular frameworks (React, Angular and Vue) were covered much, but also webfonts, Codesandbox, and V8, the engine behind JavaScript.
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This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Fronteers conference , held at Pathé Tuschinski in Amsterdam.
A single track conference covering various topics of frontend development.
The JDriven delegation this year consists of Patrick Ooteman, Auke Speksnijder and Martijn van der Wijst.
Topics are: VR, Animations, Developer tools, Caching, a11y, and WebAssembly.
The talks didn’t just cover javascript, CSS and HTML.
Also relating subjects like writing better language, tackling imposter syndrome and Japanese culture came by.
There even was a separate talk focused on emojis :) We’ll try to summarize the nicest takeaways from the past couple of days.
To start off, Niels Leenheer gives a talk about the importance of when to use and also when not to use progressive enhancement.
You can imagine that a video tag can be replaced by an image for devices that don’t support the native video tag.
But Youtube without videos, yeah, that won’t work at all.
After the audience loudly applaudes to an image of ‘goodbye Internet Explorer’, he emphasises that browser wars are a good thing.
When every browser would run on Webkit (or nowadays even Chromium), the need to make browsers better would decrease.
Also he said:
IE6 was a good browser
— Niels Leenheer
Daring statement! But then when you think about it, at the time it could do awesome things.
IE6 became a pain in the ass for developers only later, when modern browsers came around and people were still using IE6.
Key takeaway of the talk: think about users, not about browsers.
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From May 18-20 myself and Richard attended the Google IO 2016 conference.
We both visited different tracks and have some different experiences we'd like to share.
Here are mine.
Read on about topics in the likes of VR, Progressive Web Apps, and Artificial Intelligence.
For a quick impression have a look at the photo album.
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