Jozi.JS / 2018

Machine learning, neural networks and image processing are things that require quite a bit of in-depth theoretical knowledge to implement. They have so many every-day, useful applications that we take for granted. Facial and voice recognition, natural language processing, even something as simple as auto-complete, all use some form of machine learning. Surely, there must be a way for us to use the power of machine learning without having all of that algorithmic knowledge. The short answer is; yes, we can.

For the longer answer, and to find out how, join me for this talk. Using the cloud (the Microsoft one in this case) I will show how easy it is to add facial recognition to your application, and automate some of the simple tasks we do every day. No mathematics needed!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 22 November 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/254136610/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This talk will describe what a serverless architecture is and how to make use of a serverless backend in your application. It will cover the services that are provided by a serverless architecture and how they add value in the rapid creation of an application.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 22 November 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/254136610/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This talk will be about serverless functions: what they are, how we use them and what cloud providers offer us in this realm. We will look into examples of how serverless functions can be used as a new way of writing API endpoints.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 18 October 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/254136600/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

A static site comprises of some html, css and js files hosted on a server, simple and how we used to do things. Some advantages of a static site are cost, scale and speed which is why many people are using this approach for blogs and documentation sites today. Jekyll was one of the first proper static site generators to launch, it helped you write content in markdown files and then generated the html and css based on a theme. There have been a number of static site generators pop up over the years with this basic concept.

I have used static site generators to build my blog and I will chat about my experience with some of the frameworks I’ve tried. Then I will show you an approach that new js frameworks are using to help you build static sites. Using react and some plugins they use server side rendering to generate the static html, css and js. This gives you the advantages of a static site without losing the power of react. I will specifically focus on Gatsby (https://www.gatsbyjs.org/) because I really like it.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 18 October 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/254136600/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Did you know it's not that hard to build a Chatbot in JavaScript? All it takes is 15 minutes. Join me in this quick demo where we will build a basic Chatbot using the Hubot Framework.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 20 September 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/252700239/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This talk will deep dive in some of the key concepts of Functional programming and how you can start using it in your javascript code today.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 20 September 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/252700239/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Writing well documented and maintainable scripts is hard! Complicated npm scripts fast become difficult to read and reason about. Due to this complexity, we end up writing separate documentation for our scripts. This documentation soon gets out of sync and stale and we instead of solving our problem we have added to it!

Using literate programming and a CLI tool called Maid, we can write our code inside of our documentation. We can then use our language to describe the code and determine how it is run.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 16 August 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/252392124/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

It’s a set of tooling that’s just for us developers and it’s been baked into Chrome for years without any non-techies even knowing or caring about it.

This technical talk will show you how to make the most out of Chrome Dev Tools through a dozen or so demos covering everything from profiling to debugging to styling with a few console.logs throw in for good measure. No alerts though!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 16 August 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/252392124/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Say you're writing a computer game. For argument sake, you've decided not to take the easy (and much more efficient) route of using an existing game engine like Unreal or Unity. No, you've decided to write your own game engine.

Unfortunately, when choosing a programming language, you've run into a conflict! When you finally ship your game, you want to take advantage of all the high performance of running a native application. A language like Rust is an excellent fit for this. On the other hand, it will be much easier to share your game if you were to write it with web technologies and embed it in a web page, so maybe you should be writing it in JavaScript?

One way to reconcile this conflict is by using WebAssembly. In this talk, you'll see how it's done in an example of a game written in the Rust programming language, running both natively and embedded in a web browser.

You can find more of Justin at https://www.worthe-it.co.za

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 19 July 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460508/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

According to Github statistics, Javascript is the most used language today. As new Javascript frameworks and libraries are released, teams are utilizing them across all levels of the stack - the frontend, backend, desktop apps, hybrid apps, embedded devices and so much more.

There are many developers that are using Javascript every day, all day - however, many of us haven’t really delved deep into understanding the internals. Newer frameworks have made it such that developers can build full applications without ever learning about things like the javascript engine, callback queues, runtime, call stacks, concurrency, event loops, and the V8 engine.

Understanding the nuts and bolts of javascript is no longer a requirement to be able to build applications, however, knowing the details assist developers to be able to build better, cleaner and optimized applications.

During this talk, I’d like to provide you with fresh insights on how Javascript works under the hood!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 19 July 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460508/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Today we will build a PWA! We will take one part polymer, one part lit-html, and one part redux. We will then mix thoroughly and place on top of a sw-precache configured service worker. Covering the result with a combination of chrome puppeteer and WCT suites, we will bake it for approximately 45 minutes using the polymer-cli.

This code-heavy talk will look at lit-html, LitElement, and the PWA Starter Kit. We will explore how the starter kit is set up, and build a simple PWA using it.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 21 June 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460250/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This year's Entelect Challenge has been launched! The challenge is a yearly competition for professionals, students, and enthusiasts where the goal is to develop an intelligent bot to win the game, and ultimately part of R200 000 in cash. This lightning talk will introduce this year's game theme, the game dynamics and rules, the tournament format, and demonstrate how to get started with coding an intelligent bot in JavaScript from the starter pack. We will also run through the design of the platform that supports the challenge, however it's currently in development, so more a more detailed view will be available in the near future. Some members of the challenge team will also be available to chat at this event.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 24 May 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460222/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Redux is a seemingly complicated stage management tool, but it doesn't need to be. Together we will attempt to break Redux down to a simpler form, so that the lifecycle is almost transparent. Redux can easily be used with React, Vue, and Angular, so we'll look at testing, some of the side effects of Redux, some of the things you shouldn't do.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 24 May 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460222/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Kenneth will show how ClojureScript integrates with the Node & NPM ecosystem. We'll walk through a little example of rolling up tweetstorms and displaying it as one (hopefully) sensible blob of text.

Kenneth will show how ClojureScript integrates with the Node & NPM ecosystem. We'll walk through a little example of rolling up tweetstorms and displaying it as one (hopefully) sensible blob of text.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 19 April 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/246960071/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

Goat powered functional javascript. When js is not enough you add a goat, a male goat, called Ramda. He will help you create some real schwifty reusable stellar looking code.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 19 April 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/246960071/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This will be a practical approach to testing both browser and server JavaScript code. We will look at how to set up a testing framework for your project as well as some of the types of tests you will be likely to write.
We will touch on testing components, APIs, mocking, snapshot testing and even how to approach that horrible piece of jQuery code that lives in a dark corner of your code base.

This talk was recorded for the Jozi.JS meetup on 22 March 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/248463266/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

In this session I will be talking about some of the core concepts of VueJs, including:
* Components
* Vue-router
* Vuex
* Events bus. The talk will be structured around how to use the above concepts to build a real world application, in this case a music streaming service - or at least the front-end of such a service.

This talk was recorded for the Jozi.JS meetup on 22 March 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/248463266/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

This talk will go through the use cases and best practices to write React lifecycle methods, which will help in developing the highest quality React apps.

Jozi.JS exists to try and foster a community in Johannesburg, a meetup group dedicated to all things JavaScript!

The group meets on the third Thursday of the month from 18:30 to about 20:30. There are typically two speakers, on different topics: a ‘lightning talk’ of 15 minutes and a full presentation of 45 minutes.

https://www.meetup.com/jozi-js/

console.log('Code got to here - 1083')
try {
// do something
console.log('Code got to here - 1084')
} catch (err){
console.log('Code got to here - 1085')
} console.log('Code got to here - 1086')

Have you seen this type of code before? Has this been your life at some point? Looking for a better way to figure out what's happening in your code and log important information? Well then, come join us for a as we explore how logging has evolved and how you can implement these concepts to make your life better!

Jozi.JS exists to try and foster a community in Johannesburg, a meetup group dedicated to all things JavaScript!

The group meets on the third Thursday of the month from 18:30 to about 20:30. There are typically two speakers, on different topics: a ‘lightning talk’ of 15 minutes and a full presentation of 45 minutes.

https://www.meetup.com/jozi-js/

Devices, smart devices everywhere. This is what our world is turning into. Your car tells you how to drive, your watch tells you when to exercise, and your phone tells you when you are hungry. OK, maybe that last bit is a little over the top, but I’m sure someone will make an app like that soon. All of this is controlled by applications which use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to connect and communicate with each other. However, this is never enough for us as developers, we need to be in control.

The Chrome dev team started the Physical Web movement with the intention of making everything smarter. With Web Bluetooth we can control almost any Bluetooth Low Energy device from a website. No longer dependent on the platform we are using or on apps which require installation or updates. All we need is a browser which supports it.

This talk will cover some of the fundamental concepts of connecting to BLE devices using Chrome, including some privacy and security considerations. Using the Angular Web Bluetooth module we will create and deploy a website and show how anyone can easily connect to a bluetooth device just by opening their web browser.

Demo: http://heart-rate-hack.firebaseapp.com/

Jozi.JS exists to try and foster a community in Johannesburg, a meetup group dedicated to all things JavaScript!

The group meets on the third Thursday of the month from 18:30 to about 20:30. There are typically two speakers, on different topics: a ‘lightning talk’ of 15 minutes and a full presentation of 45 minutes.

https://www.meetup.com/jozi-js/

When looking at keeping up code quality and maintainability of your code base, as well as make CI and a good night's sleep on prod deployments a possibility. I will be looking at the pros, cons and a brief "how to start implementing" of unit tests and code reviews - comparing them to each other.

Jozi.JS exists to try and foster a community in Johannesburg, a meetup group dedicated to all things JavaScript!

The group meets on the third Thursday of the month. There are typically two speakers, on different topics: a ‘lightning talk’ of 15 minutes and a full presentation of 45 minutes.

https://www.meetup.com/jozi-js/