TXJS 2012 | Texas JavaScript Conference

1120 South Lamar Boulevard

Austin • Texas

78704

U.S.A.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Alex Russell
Lea Verou
Jacob Thornton
Rebecca Murphey

Info

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10:00am – 5:00pm

Bocoup Pre-Conference Training

Bocoup (who is also providing us with beautiful 100mbit WiFi) is doing a 1 day training at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz (Downtown - read: different than the conference venue). Ben Alman will be going over JavaScript from 10am to 5pm. Lunch is included! Contact @bocouptraining if you have any questions.

June 13th, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

The Enyo Pre-Conference Drinkup

Get off of work a touch early and join us at The Gingerman for a few drinks and some good conversation at 6pm on June 13th.

The Enyo team will be around to chat about all things JavaScript and they'd love it if you had a few drinks on their tab, because they're good people like that.

7:45am – 8:45am • 6:30pm – 10:15pm

The Shuttle

TXJS will be providing a shuttle from downtown at the Radisson to the conference venue The Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. The bus will start picking up at 7:45am and make its last pickup 8:45am. If you miss the bus, it's a short taxi ride, no worries!

Then after the conference you'll be free to leave the party to head back downtown. The bus will start making trips 30 minutes into the party and will continue to make trips until 15 minutes after the party ends.

All Day

The Disqus Hackroom

Our 3rd Party JavaScript slinging hacker friends at Disqus were kind enough to provision us with a proper hack room during the entire conference! Feel free to head into that room to work on something you were inspired by in a talk, or just go in there to argue about semicolons. Either way, there'll be WiFi, power, some A/V equipment, some arduinos and plenty of room. An official hallway track!

6:00pm – 10:00pm

The Bazaarvoice TXJS After Party at the Highball

A mere 100ft from the conference venue is the local Austin favorite "The Highball."

Head over to the Highball for bowling, karaoke (in a private room!), light appetizers, board games, ski ball, cocktails, beer and more! We won't have a full dinner for you but we should be able to tide you over until you can make it to one of the many close-by restaraunts or the shuttle back downtown.

The shuttle begins picking up at 6:30pm, right outside the Highball. The last shuttle pickup is at 10:15pm. We strongly encourage you to make this trip or plan on taking a taxi to your desitination

Schedule

	Compass Learning Theater • Theater 2	Mozilla Theater • Theater 3
8:15 – 9:00	Registration and TacoDeli Breakfast Tacos Sponsored by RGA
9:00 – 9:10	Welcome Alex Sexton
9:20 – 10:10	Rebecca Murphey @rmurphey The New Baseline for Front-End Developers spkr8.com/t/11171 Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential workflow of a front-end dev. We measured our mettle based on our ability to wrangle IE6 into submission or achieve pixel perfection across browsers. Many members of the community – myself included – lacked traditional programming experience. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – usually in the form of jQuery – were self-taught skills. Something has changed in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s the result of people starting to take front-end dev seriously, maybe it’s browser vendors mostly getting their shit together, or maybe it’s front-end devs – again, myself included – coming to see some well-established light about the process of software development.	Guillermo Rauch @rauchg Socket.IO 1.0: how far we've come, what's new, where we're headed. spkr8.com/t/12091 An in-depth look into the world of websockets through the lens of the most popular websockets library.
10:20 – 11:00	Lea Verou @leaverou /Reg(exp){2}lained/: Demystifying Regular Expressions spkr8.com/t/11181 Quick, what does this do: /(\/\?\\/)\|\/\/.?(\r?\n\|$)/g? If you’re like many developers, you just averted your eyes, and your heart is now in your throat. Symptoms included sweaty palms and recurring nightmares with blood-thirsty ASCII symbols. But don’t worry, this condition doesn’t have to be chronic. A cure is right around the corner. As with many developers, you’re familiar with the power of regular expressions, but anything beyond the basics scares the crap out of you. Fear no more young padawan! In this talk, we’ll start with the basics and progressively enhance your knowledge until you’re coding regular expressions like a champ. Everything will be demonstrated live with visual examples that ensure maximum comprehension.	Majd Taby @jtaby Tools and Techniques for Faster Development spkr8.com/t/11191 We'll walk through the process of building an application and solving the typical problems you might encounter along the way. Find out what tools and techniques work best for each class of problem and learn some shortcuts and tips along the way. We'll mainly cover mobile web development, Chrome Canary, and OS X tools. Difficulty level: Beginner to Intermediate.
11:10 – 11:50	Marcin Wichary @mwichary You gotta do what you gotta do: Messing with Google’s homepage spkr8.com/t/11201 Marcin had his hand in popular interactive homepage doodles celebrating Pac-Man, Stanisław Lem, and Jules Verne, among others. What kind of things we need to worry about when we put things on such a popular destination? Which rules cannot be broken and which ones absolutely have to? What contraptions did we put together? What things did we learn the hard way? Why do we love and hate JavaScript at the same time?	Heather Arthur @harthvader Machine Learning for Us spkr8.com/t/11211 Machine learning and its super powers have been kept from the hands of JS hackers for too long, but that is changing. In this talk, we'll go through the steps of solving a machine learning problem in JS. We'll also take a look at the current landscape of libraries and hear lessons learned from writing machine learning code in JavaScript.
12:00 – 12:40	Alex Russell @slightlylate Overconstrained: the Secret Lives of Rectangles spkr8.com/t/11221 Ever wonder how CSS engines decide what to do when something has both a width and a min-width? Or how table layout really works? And what is the formalism that underpins CSS, anyway? This talk walks through more than a decade of work in both industry and academia to try to get a handle on how to drag CSS out of the ad-hoc cesspool and into the can-be-reasoned-about light. Some updated work into describing important aspects of CSS formally will be presented; but don't worry, they're in JS and they're anything but pointless. They're so awesome you might just want to use them on your very next project.	Laura Doktorova @olado Javascript Templating spkr8.com/t/11231 Client or server, templates come in handy when dealing with HTML, CSS, SVG, emails etc. doT.js is the fastest, most concise fully featured javascript template engine for Node.js and browsers. I will highlight what makes doT.js so fast and showcase powerful templating tricks that you can leverage in your projects.
12:40 – 1:40	Lunch Sponsored by Harvest
1:40 – 2:20	Tom Dale @tomdale Ember.js: More than Meets the Eye spkr8.com/t/12081 Many developers know that Ember.js is designed to solve the problems that every web developer faces. They might even be familiar with some of its most popular features, like computed properties, bindings, and observers. But the real power of Ember.js is in a set of conventions for common problems that other frameworks force you to decide for each new project. In this talk, Tom will illustrate why having common conventions and vocabulary increases productivity and makes it easier for developers to collaborate. He'll also demonstrate some of the powerful new features in Ember.js that make managing complexity in large web applications easy—and even fun.	Pamela Fox @pamelafox localStorage: Use it, Don't Abuse It spkr8.com/t/11241 Modern browsers now support localStorage, a way to persistently store website data on the browser. This HTML5 API can be a great way to improve your desktop or mobile website, both in terms of performance and user experience... but if you use it the wrong way, it can make your website worse. Ruh-roh! In this talk, we’ll talk about the different ways you can benefit from localStorage and how to avoid the common pitfalls.
2:30 – 3:10	Dan Webb @danwrong Putting The Web Back In Web Applications spkr8.com/t/11251 Client-based, single-page web apps built on MVC Frameworks are all the rage in the JavaScript community at the moment but, as we found at Twitter, when you move past the TODO applications and start to build out an site that used the world over by millions of users, there are some severe limitations. We’ll talk you through those limitations and when browser-orientated MVC isn’t the best fit for your application then show an alternative approach to web application development that we’re using to rebuild a faster, simpler and more robust twitter.com. You’ll take away techniques to help you move beyond MVC and build applications that work with the web rather than try to beat it into submission.	Frances Berriman @phae Designing better user experiences (it's your job) spkr8.com/t/11261 Whether you know it or not, “UX Designer” is in your job description. Understand more about how you can get involved with improving experiences for your site, with a set of practical design principles that go beyond interaction and visual design, and can be used by everyone on your team, no matter their discipline.
3:20 – 4:00	Jed Schmidt @jedschmidt NPM: Node’s Personal Manservant spkr8.com/t/11271 In just 30 months, node.js has gone from an obscure toy to the most watched development platform on GitHub. Once the next stable version ships, significant focus will move to improving the community-driven ecosystem of modules, making it easier to navigate and contribute. In this talk, Jed will introduce the two faces of NPM, the official node.js package manager: NPM the ecosystem, for finding existing modules and developing and publishing your own modules, and NPM the tool, for managing and streamlining node.js workflows for your own projects.	Dave Rupert @davatron5000 Javascript in Responsive Web Design spkr8.com/t/12101 While Responsive Web Design (#buzzword) is essentially a group of CSS practices (we'll cover that) and would seemingly have no place being a topic of conversation at a serious Javascript conference for serious web developers, RWD is also a wide open frontier for JS devs. From tiny jQuery plugins (we'll cover that), to polyfills (we'll cover some of these), to feature requests that browsers are too lazy to implement (#HOTDRAMA), Javascript is being used in simple and complex ways to fill gaps on the way to creating a better fluid web.
4:10 – 4:50	Jacob Thornton @fat Bootstrap.js: Hella advancedy spkr8.com/t/11281 A look at the less talked about and poorly documented features of Bootstrap's JS.	Brendan Kenny @brendankenny Needs More Fans: Javascript and your GPU spkr8.com/t/12111 WebGL and speedy Javascript bring a slew of new content and visualization possibilities to the web. We have seen some amazing demos and a handful of games, but quite a lot of effort was put into making WebGL a first-class citizen of the web. Its potential should encompass much more. In this talk, I’ll shamelessly parade my own work visualizing large geographic datasets so we can examine some of the ways the user’s relationship with content changes as graphics become interactive. We’ll also cover keeping your Javascript engine happy and your GPU well fed, as well as the tools we have (and the tools we need to build) to be effective at keeping them that way.
5:00 – 5:40	Brendan Eich @brendaneich JavaScript, Wesley Snipes, Unicorns, and You* spkr8.com/t/12121 * Potentially not really his talk.	Patrick Filler @pfiller When GitHub Attacks spkr8.com/t/11291 I released a jQuery plugin called Chosen with the hopes that a few hundred people might find it interesting. Less than a year later, it has become one of the most watched projects on GitHub with a steady stream of issues, pull requests and emails. In this talk, I'll discuss the perils of maintaining a popular open source project from a rookie's perspective. I'll also take a look at how we can better encourage people to contribute to existing projects and release more of their own works.
5:40 – 6:00	Wrap-up Head to the Highball!

Austin • Texas

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Bocoup Pre-Conference Training

The Enyo Pre-Conference Drinkup

The Shuttle

The Disqus Hackroom

The Bazaarvoice TXJS After Party at the Highball

Registration and TacoDeli Breakfast Tacos

Sponsored by RGA

Welcome

Alex Sexton

Rebecca Murphey @rmurphey

The New Baseline for Front-End Developers

Guillermo Rauch @rauchg

Socket.IO 1.0: how far we've come, what's new, where we're headed.

Lea Verou @leaverou

/Reg(exp){2}lained/: Demystifying Regular Expressions

Majd Taby @jtaby

Tools and Techniques for Faster Development

Marcin Wichary @mwichary

You gotta do what you gotta do: Messing with Google’s homepage

Heather Arthur @harthvader

Machine Learning for Us

Alex Russell @slightlylate

Overconstrained: the Secret Lives of Rectangles

Laura Doktorova @olado

Javascript Templating

Lunch

Sponsored by Harvest

Tom Dale @tomdale

Ember.js: More than Meets the Eye

Pamela Fox @pamelafox

localStorage: Use it, Don't Abuse It

Dan Webb @danwrong

Putting The Web Back In Web Applications

Frances Berriman @phae

Designing better user experiences (it's your job)

Jed Schmidt @jedschmidt

NPM: Node’s Personal Manservant

Dave Rupert @davatron5000

Javascript in Responsive Web Design

Jacob Thornton @fat

Bootstrap.js: Hella advancedy

Brendan Kenny @brendankenny

Needs More Fans: Javascript and your GPU

Brendan Eich @brendaneich

JavaScript, Wesley Snipes, Unicorns, and You*

Patrick Filler @pfiller

When GitHub Attacks

Wrap-up

Head to the Highball!