You should start a tech community too. | JS Conf 2019

Remember loving to read comics on a Sunday afternoon when you were a kid? Maybe you don’t. In the past, traditional print comics have made it impossible for blind and visually-impaired readers to experience their heroes’ adventures first-hand. Today an increasing number of initiatives like comic book stores for the blind aim to overcome this challenge. What if I told you that the web platform empowers us to even create comics for literally everyone? Alongside a demo application, you see how accessibility best practices enable you to craft an immersive webcomic experience that is not only engaging for the sighted but accessible for everyone.

Javascript runs on nearly any platform. Most languages can compile to Javascript. It’s well-positioned to become the lingua franca of programmers, with one problem: Like most programming languages, Javascript is based on English. 89% of the world’s population doesn’t speak any English. Many of those people can’t even read the Latin script. If we want Javascript to be a lingua franca, we need to ensure it is accessible to all people, regardless of their native language. Let’s look at the barriers that non-native speakers face when contributing to OSS Javascript projects and what it would take to remove them entirely, so that two developers could collaborate without speaking the same language. We will see what techniques Javascript can borrow from other languages by taking a look at করো (koro), a project which adds Bengali support to the Go compiler. And, we will learn enough about compilers and character encoding to answer the eternal question: “Could we do this in Javascript?”

In 2009 I was managing Yahoo’s tech event budget when we agreed to sponsor the very first JSConf, the one that almost didn’t happen, the one that started something… And though I’ve still never attended a JSConf, nor learned to code, the zeitgeist of the JavaScript community and its event culture have had a profound effect on how I live and the devrel work I do. I’d like to speak about cultivating “JavaScript: The Good Times”—the evolution of inclusiveness, the effort to replace customs that no longer reflect the values and demographics of the community, the focus on new practices for joyful conference-going and knowledge sharing. The JavaScript ethos has fueled a reinvention of the tech gathering as an act of participation and experiment, generating enduring artifacts for learning and excellent new habits for our relationships - personal and professional.

There’s a divisive movement around the world which has arguable impacted the software development community. How can we remain open-minded and respectful when talking about different programming paradigms or languages? In this talk, I will be talking about empathy, how we can have divergent views and still have meaningful conversations.

Until 1992, the web was largely textual, reserved almost exclusively to academia, with the charm of searching for library books via card catalogs. The sea change came when a browser allowed for both text and images to now be displayed in the viewport. Despite some vehement opposition, this was described as the "gateway to the riches of the internet". This was a technological advancement that some had wagered would further fuel more advacement. We now have seen technologies like APIs, PWAs, DevTools and many more. “The Shape Of The Web” is about both accomplishments and challenges that lay in past, present and future of the web - from its technologies employed and its employed technologists.

Not long ago, it seemed like JavaScript devices were going to free JS developers from the constraints of the browser and let us control every aspect of our lives as easily as we once controlled hover menus. Though nodebots were captivating, many of us were anxious for the JS device revolution to reach a more mundane destination: our phones. And yet today the constraints of the mobile landscape look not much different from several years ago. We have the same two operating systems, the same two app stores, and same option to write a native app or push people to save what is still mostly a bookmark. How did we cover so little distance, given the enthusiasm, resources, and potential that appeared to exist, and more importantly, how close can we come to a JavaScript phone today?

I will share my story of establishing and growing JS Community in a developing country Nepal. How tech communities will help you and other grow together ? Challenges that you might face while starting a community in your place. (Based on my experience) How to overcome these challenges ?

“Queers hate techies,” the slogan proudly proclaimed in a window in San Francisco. Being a queer techie, I was immediately conflicted. The tech industry provides a safe haven for many queer folks, myself included. It offers stable employement to us more willingly than other industries. These benefits don’t extend to all queer folks though, and these benefits are often revoked as soon as we step out of line. Queer folks are a model minority in an industry who’s products often negatively impact our community. This talk will dive into these complications and how we can improve the tech industry to make it a truly welcoming place for queer folks.

Teaching programming to children is hard. Computer Science topics can be difficult to grasp using standard programming languages and tools. Using MIT’s Scratch programming platform, creating games and working software is simple and fun thanks to their drag and drop interface. To prove that this is as simple as it sounds, this session will be led by a 13-year-old. What better way to learn how to teach kids how to code than by learning from a kid?

This talk will discuss why we think that JavaScript is a good language option for IoT development by walking you through a loosely coupled end to end IoT system, from new device on-boarding to remote access via gateway. Technologies we have been used and/or contributed to for building the IoT system using JavaScript will be discussed. At each stage, GDPR compliance of these technologies will be looked into. To address the issue of resource restriction in embedded devices, we will introduce you to JerryScript, an ultra-light JavaScript engine by Samsung. It is followed by a comparison of popular JavaScript platforms based on JerryScript that provide direct JavaScript APIs to developers. The open gateway framework is node.js based and targets at decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ with privacy and security in mind.