From 16 to 17 October this year JSConf Colombia 2015 event was held in the city of Medellin, Colombia and I had the opportunity to attend. In Rootstack we have already developed projects using Angular for the front-end and has definitely left us wanting to learn more. That was one of the most important reasons to go to the JSConf: see things which are new on the market, how they are doing things and thinking of ways to improve.
The event was divided into a day of workshops and a day of conferences in which speakers were invited from the United States, Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands. Among the speakers they were Brendan Eichel, Javascript creator and cofounder of Mozilla, Raquel Vélez from the NPM team, Alex Sexton from Stripe, Jaime Rosales from Autodesk and Matthew Podwysocki from Microsoft, among others.
We traditionally associate Javascript with `undefined is not a function` showing in the browser console but from the moment Brendan Eichel put his hands on it, it has evolved to what it is today. It has become a versatile language and with different applications, a clear example of this were in the talks we saw:
Tim Pietrusky from NERDDISCO showed us his music visualizer that he played live and while encouraging a bucket of leds; all this using JS.
Donovan Buck showed us his Tharp robot which controls the movements of his hand. He explained how the idea for the robot was transformed into a reality.
We also had talks, more "traditional", so to speak but not ceased to be impressive and interesting:
Damian Schenkelman from Auth0 gave a speech about JS parallelization in the browser and with clear examples he showed the difference in performance in an application to implement it.
Alex Sexton from Stripe created awareness regarding the security in our applications. As developers we spend time creating them but not much time researching how to make them safer than normal. He showed a couple of really surprising and unexpected ways of infringing applications. Obviously they came accompanied by a series of recommendations to defend ourselves (not limited to JS) but were raised to be applied in any web application.
From the event I kept several things. The first is to thank the organization of the event by Catherine López, Juan Pablo Buriticá, Julián Duque, David Avellaneda, Adrián Estrada, Julianah Díaz and the JSConf Colombia Team. It has been one of the best events I have attended: punctuality, organization, order. Second, the quality of exhibitors and the level of the talks was very good and really drive developers to learn more.
During the two-day event, the topics to be discussed further confirm that JS is a very robust language and is not the same as when he was born. It has great potential and there are many interesting projects to get involved and learn.
For our part we will continue working with JS frameworks and hope to attend the next JSConf Colombia.
