Yesterday I attended the Autumn 2014 London JS Conference at The Royal Institution, a London based organization dedicated to science and also home to the Faraday Museum. I was lucky to score a free last minute ticket the day before through the London MeetUp chapter of Women Who Code, an organization I recently joined. The day featured a really great lineup, and for me at least, covered a diverse range of topics. The speakers were Domenic Denicola: The State of JavaScript, Sébastien Cevey: Server-less Applications, Vikki Read: Acceptance Testing, Paul King: Fun with the Command Line, Mathias Bynens: JavaScript *heart* Unicode, Nuno Job: A Take in Production NodeJS, and Martin Kleppe: Byte Shifting. And lots not forget The Royal Institution’s heated show following lunch, a thirty minute chemistry diversion featuring lots of fire, as seen below:
I found the most compelling topics either referenced or discussed in detail during the day long event, to be:
- johnny-five.js
- Web Components
- Terminal (for creating GIFs! and changing your IP)
- JavaScript & Unicode
- JS1k: The JavaScript code golfing competition
Johnny-Five caught my attention during the first talk, as its an open source JavaScript Arduino programming framework. At UID, we almost strictly used Processing, so while Johnny-Five isn’t new to the world, it was to me, and an exciting replacement to Processing and foreseeable way for me to integrate JavaScript into physical computing. I found a very short and easy tutorial on Instructables in conjunction with NodeJS.