Our development team had an unusually busy end of February. We hosted our first-ever Builders’ Meeting, welcoming other engineering teams in the Miami area, and that following weekend members of our team namely, myself and Francisco, headed to San Francisco for nerd time at ForwardJS, a JavaScript-focused conference Downtown.
With tutorial days mixed in and a single, all-day conference on the schedule for the week, Sunday was spent exploring and getting settled as first-time SF visitors. If you’ve never been, take it from us that SF is a city with beautiful architecture and landscape. For one, they have hills with steep inclines which is cool to see coming from incredibly-flat Miami. I made a couple touristy stops before the day was through, visiting The Palace of Fine Arts, getting a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge from Chrissy Field and then taking in the fantastic sight that is Twin Peaks before getting dinner with Francisco in the Embarcadero Waterfront area and calling it a night ahead of tutorial day number one.
View of The Golden Gate Bridge from Chrissy Field
One thing to know about San Francisco is that its food game is generally on point as day one’s breakfast highlighted: fantastic salmon scrambled eggs and eggs Benedict. Another thing to know is that there are apparently consumer incentives for low-emission vehicles as most of the cars we traveled in were hybrids which stood out to us.
ForwardJS tutorials are all day (9:30am - 4:30pm) affairs and absolutely worth the time spent. They're on the smaller side in terms of class sizes and give you the chance for a deeper understanding of specific topics. Of the plethora of tutorial options available during the week, Francisco and I picked subjects on:
In addition to being exposed to great content on JavaScript, web development and getting to explore San Francisco, one of the other major highlights of attending tech conferences of this nature is being able to meet others in the industry and learn about the contexts in which they work. Lunch tutorial breaks were ripe for this occasion, especially since we conveniently ate in the hotel restaurant where the conference was hosted. Besides lunch, the conference organizers hosted a few happy hour events to facilitate more socializing which was also fun. We partook in some street sushi and hard cider and loved it.
Conference day came and went with a few tutorial-appropriate subjects but of course in bite-sized talks. We attended sessions that highlighted the importance of designing applications smartly to reduce user cognitive load in making decisions, introduced the concept of service workers (very cool stuff), explored ReactJS virtualization (windowing) and a few other talks touching on React basics and best practices. All-in-all, it was quite an organized and adequately paced conference day with awesome presenters. Before I forget, thanks to our group lunches (and street sushi) we also managed to make some conference friends!
Conference friends! From bottom-left, clock-wise: Francisco Marcano (BrightGauge, Miami, FL), William Lubelski and Lara Parvinsmith (EverTrue, Boston, MA), Jordan Maslyn (CO+LAB, Richmond, VA), Keith Perfetti (Def Method Inc., New York City, NY) and me, David Small (BrightGauge, Miami, FL)
At the end of it all after being sufficiently enlightened and intrigued by a few concepts, we definitely returned to Miami eager to make some changes to our BrightGauge development. On a technical level a small portion of our service is built using ReactJS taking advantage of ES6 goodness but the majority of the remaining, highly-interactive portions, use AngularJS and CoffeeScript. Having seen a few sessions on ES6 we’ll be looking into implementing it and moving away from CoffeeScript and ES5. We also want to evaluate and possibly revamp some of our asynchronous design patterns and look into improved server-side data compression. We also had no idea that the yarn package manager was a thing and worth considering as a replacement for npm - definitely worth looking into as well. We were happy to have spent the time in San Francisco taking in some great content from a sweet conference, exploring a beautiful city and making new friends.
Take a look at a few of our other pics from the trip in our Facebook album!