TL;DR: FullStack 2016 rocked, and OMG progressive web apps

I spent the last three days immersed in the world of FullStack 2016 - the conference on JavaScript, Node & Internet of Things. Broadly speaking, the sessions I attended covered new and future JavaScript features, principles of AWS Cloud and Lambda, an intro to Angular II, CSS & JS animations, React dev tools, React architecture & higher order components, how ELM inspired redux, JSON schema, a fun and light hearted Tessel 2 workshop and more. Even Ember. And there were a lot of Pokemon Go references. Most importantly, there was a LOT of excitement about progressive web apps (PWAs) and sessions about service workers, the tech that enables them. This stuff is the latest dev world bandwagon to be jumped upon and will be very big very soon. Watch out for my next blog post on PWAs coming soon to the Trainline Engineering blog :)

The conference opened with a keynote speech from Chris Heilmann who works as a browser developer for Microsoft. The thing that struck me most about his talk was the emphasis on developing for accessibility and for users in developing nations who don’t necessarily have a fast connection and may be limited to an older/more obscure browser. This theme continued through several other talks and really got me thinking. It’s definitely something I will be putting more emphasis on from now on. I’ve started using aria tags and developing modules that allow read the date in a sensible way, since unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be as much out there to help with this as you might think.

Another theme Chris spoke about was not trying to fight your browser! It was created the way it was for a good and sensible reason, so embrace the limitations and work with it rather than hacking your way into making things render nicely on the three browsers you actually bother to test stuff on. Because somewhere in the world someone will be looking at it on UC browser scratching their head and thinking ‘well that looks pretty terrible, I bet they didn't mean to do that’. This seems pretty sensible to me. The star of the moment PWAs of course got a mention, as a way of bringing native apps back to the web and making content more accessible for more people. Very cool stuff indeed.

Another stand out talk I attended was about the past (callbacks), present (promises) and future (ES6 generators & async await) of Javascript. A crash course in the pros and cons of callbacks and promises, presented extremely well and very to-the-point.

The conference overall was pretty amazing. Check out the videos of all the talks here. The range of topics and quality of presentations was generally very good. Everything spoken about was on the cutting edge of current technology and we were all very excited and inspired by it all, not wanting the three days to end yet eager to get home and try some new things out. I met loads of amazing people over the three days too. Smart, friendly and enthusiastic developers from all over the world, some of whom had travelled a long way to be there and were only too happy to discuss, debate and predict the future. There was a common feeling that we’re very lucky to be involved in a sector that is this exciting and progressive, and 2016 is perhaps the most exciting year for it so far. But 2017 is going to be even better. And no, try as it might, the crazy politics of these times is not going to hold us back. Because we’re smart, we’re young, we’re international and we are going to change the world.

Nat x