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The politics of JavaScript – video presentation from Angus Croll

Angus Croll ponders the emergence of moralizing and faith-based JavaScript and discusses how an alternative approach grounded in knowledge, experience and understanding will make us all better coders and encourage creativity and innovation. Like what you see? Want a piece of the action next time around? Then get along to Web Directions South in Sydney […]

Making things with maths – presentation video from Steven Wittens

The browser used to be a meek sandbox, shut off from all the things that native apps could do. But now we’ve grown up, and with WebGL, Canvas, Web Audio, Device Access and more, we have a lot of power at our fingertips. To really unlock this potential and make all this data dance, we […]

JavaScript – Enter The Dragon – Dmitry Baranovskiy

Photo of Dmitry BaranovskiySome time ago now JavaScript stopped being a toy language and became a serious player. Yet when you browse through the plethora of code and different discussions you get the sense that a lot of people, even those who use it every day, are still quite confused about the language — its great power, and your great responsibility toward it as a developer. Demystifying this is the purpose of the entire second day of Web Directions Code, which Dmitry will introduce in a keynote you won’t forget for a long time.

Getting closure in JavaScript – Mark Dalgleish

Photo of Mark DalgleishAn in-depth look at how JavaScript’s first-class functions and lexical scope allow us to write powerful and expressive code. Through the single topic of immediately invoked function expressions, we’ll touch upon function scope, closures, JavaScript “classes”, CoffeeScript and ECMAScript 5.

Beyond event listeners – Damon Oehlman

Photo of Damon OehlmanStuck in the land of DOM-based event handling in your JS code? While jQuery (and other libraries) help ease the pain, they don’t solve all the problems. This session will explore modern JS event libraries that will change the way you architect and build your apps forever.

Write JavaScript like it’s 2012 – Tony Milne

Photo of Tony MilneThis 15 minute party may or may not include: when and how to load and run JavaScript on page load; JavaScript coding conventions you should adopt; a look at writing callback oriented JavaScript and some JavaScript performance tips for fun and profit.

Removing the gag from your browser – Jared Wyles

Photo of Jared WylesBefore we fork out for expensive performance monitoring tools, what if we took the time to listen to what our browser was trying to tell us? We can discover a whole range of features you may have ignored. Discover how to debug network latency issues, memory leaks and other performance fun in our browsers. With web applications becoming more like desktop apps, remaining open for days at a time. Now is the time to listen to your browsers pain and walk away with a new toolkit of performance best practices.

Clientside templates for reactive UI – Tim Oxley

Photo of Tim OxleyToday’s web browser is a powerful application platform, challenging the traditional responsibilities of web application server and client. In this session we learn to harness the browser to do some of the heavy-lifting traditionally delegated to the server-side.
Pushing rendering tasks onto the web browser reduces the amount of hand-holding required of a server, minimising network utilisation and lag involved in user interactions. This decouples our views from our server implementation and can improve overall application performance. Your web applications will feel snappy and light­weight, presenting a more pleasant user experience.
We will explore the implications of client-side rendering and the differences between popular client-side templating tools, such as jQuery templates, EJS, Underscore and Handlebars, evaluating compatibility, performance, expressiveness and project health, while comparing statistics and user experience with traditional server-side templating techniques.

Debugging secrets of a lazy developer – Ryan Seddon

Photo of Ryan Seddon Client-side unit test­ing can be a pain­ful thing to test in all browsers, so as a “lazy developer” I like to do as little as pos­sible. We’ll dive into how we can auto­mate this pro­cess and what tools are out there to help us and how I use these on Modernizr.

Node’s Personal Manservant – Jed Schmidt

Photo of Jed Schmidt In just 30 months, node.js has gone from an obscure toy to the most watched devel­op­ment plat­form on Git­Hub. Once the next stable ver­sion ships, sig­ni­fic­ant focus will move to improv­ing the community-driven eco­sys­tem of mod­ules, mak­ing it easier to nav­ig­ate and con­trib­ute. In this talk, Jed will intro­duce the two faces of NPM, the offi­cial node.js pack­age man­ager: NPM the eco­sys­tem, for find­ing exist­ing mod­ules and devel­op­ing and pub­lish­ing your own mod­ules, and NPM the tool, for man­aging and stream­lin­ing node.js work­flows for your own projects.

Damon Oehlman – HTML5 API Soup

Photo of Damon OehlmanIn this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps.

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this was a masterfully curated event … a brilliant day that educated, entertained, and rekindled some old connections

Ash Donaldson Service & Behaviour Design Director, Tobias
Portrait of Ash Donaldson