Last weekend, while the rest of the broadcasting world was absorbed with IBC, and I attended in Berlin; an industry conference about JavaScript and web development.
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I was there to present some of the department's work around , in a talk titled ‘’. I had been contacted by some of the organisers a few months back. They were interested in our work, and they encouraged me to submit a talk proposal.
A few weeks later, I was both delighted to find my talk had been accepted, but also suddenly terrified at the prospect of speaking at such a huge conference alongside so many influential JavaScript experts…
When I arrived at the conference, I was overwhelmed by how welcoming everyone was, which put me a little more at ease. When it was my turn to take the stage, I was still incredibly nervous and ended up speaking too fast, but at least I didn’t freeze and forget all my words! It was great to see people enjoying the concept of and I had lots of people come and ask me questions about our system, and about !
There was a really interesting mix of talks at the conference, ranging from the heavily technical to the utterly inspirational; incorporating software, hardware and even ! Here is a by no means complete list of some that I found particularly relevant and interesting:
of Google explained how the serviceworker will help web apps catch up with their native counterparts. I particularly liked his view that ‘when native has something the web doesn’t, we should consider it a bug’. I know from experience how frustrating it can be - we’ve run into problems on a new project because the Web Audio API can’t access the sound output of a mobile device, whereas native apps can. Let’s hope this ‘bug’ gets fixed soon! helped clarify the weirdness of JavaScript type coercion, and of Github advised on how to navigate the mess of state and events when building large-scale JavaScript applications.
presented a psychedelic display of shaders for live graphics; I particularly enjoyed the fractal borders on text! showed us how removing the UI layer on a Firefox OS phone leaves you with a kind of cheap, small ‘microcontroller’ with sensors; which could be something for to look into! entertained us with some hilarious GIFs, but with a really serious and interesting message about how you can tear them apart into frames and do all kinds of video processing.
gave a fascinating talk on accessibility on the web, something that is of great importance to the ±«Óãtv. She described how quick wins like using :focus wherever you use :hover in CSS can aid non-mouse users. ±«Óãtv R&D has an team who are passionate about improving our services. At the moment, a lot of work is based around broadcasting (e.g. subtitles) but as the ±«Óãtv’s online presence increases, research into web accessibility will become more and more important.
delivered a brilliantly argued piece for why diversity is essential to building sustainable, open source communities. told an inspiring tale about the process of evolving as a developer, and all the self-doubt and imposter syndrome it entails! spoke of how she discovered a love for coding and made the difficult decision to give up her life as a teacher and start from scratch as a programmer. Let’s hope that others like her will have the opportunity to discover and follow their technology passions from an earlier age!
Look out for videos of all the talks appearing on the channel.
What really struck me about the conference was how many women were speaking. When I counted up afterwards I realised I had seen equal numbers of men and women, which is almost unheard of at a technology event! The how they made an effort to reach out to those less likely to submit proposals, and I think it really paid off. Many people agreed that the conference was richer for it, both in terms of the atmosphere and the quality of the talks. The ±«Óãtv is always keen to improve on diversity, and we will be looking at what lessons we can take from events like these.
