Jozi.JS / 2019

At the core of user engagement and experience is the visual aesthetic of any software. While css, html and JavaScript give us the core tools we need to create our visuals, creating complex visuals encompassing geometrical features is often challenging for inexperienced developers; In comes the Processing Foundation with P5.js.

In this talk, we’ll be looking at a few ways visuals can influence and drive user decisions. This talk will introduce the audience to the Processing foundation’s P5.js library with a practical tutorial on how to create astounding visuals with ease and provide sources for further exploration of the library. If you’re interested in effective data visualisation, building video games, and creating interactive experiences in the browser, this talk is for you.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 20 June 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/261100011/

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

Offline capabilities are not normally associated with web applications, but the latest advancements in web technologies enable the development of a web application that can function regardless of the network state. In this talk, I’ll show you how we created a truly offline-first progressive web application by using modern web technologies such as Service Workers and IndexedDB.

You will learn what progressive web applications are, which characteristics make them behave and feel like mobile applications and why we chose to develop one for our client. I’ll also show you some of the techniques we used to ensure optimal performance regardless of the amount of data that was stored, what the network conditions were like, and what device it was running on. We will also cover some of the sync mechanisms that made the application fully functional even in the most remote areas of South Africa. Lastly, we will have a look at the upcoming advancements in web technologies and how this will further enhance the development of next-generation web applications.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 23 May 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/260470684/

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

Machine learning has earned a reputation for needing complex mathematics, gigantic datasets and expensive hardware. This has unfortunately led many developers to see machine learning as something out of their reach. I will show you how we can make use of the web browser to run prebuilt tensorflow.js models just as we would use any other JavaScript software library.

We will look at the advantages of using the web browser for doing machine learning, and how we can take advantage of something called transfer learning to tweak existing models to do some really fun things in the browser. This talk is suitable for beginners and no existing machine learning knowledge is required.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 21 February 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/257857962/

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 a transition from Dyalog APL to JavaScript. Detailing to weird move from an old but still kicking language to a modern "Here are all the pieces now put them together” language which is JavaScript.

This will include a detail description of what Dyalog is so everyone can get the feel of what I was doing before. Then I will be talking about the languages differences and how JavaScript has made my development workflow so easy. And to close everything off I will be talking about what I'm currently working on and how different the workflow if I did not have JavaScript.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 21 February 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/257857962/

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.

Sometimes we take things for granted. We get so caught up in the churn of software development, that we never take the time to reflect, introspect and ask the important questions. For me, this is wondering where we are, how we got here and where we should go next.

Join me as I unpack a little bit of history, a little bit of context, and ask a really hard question: what *should* the web do?

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 31 January 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/257737169/

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.

Learn the best way to implement Workbox Cache Strategies and bundling up the JavaScript for Progressiveness.

Learn or get tipped on when and how to add these Cache Strategies and the type of resources to think of for each strategy. It's important to note that being too Cachy is costly when building progressive web apps.

And finally as an add-on, I'll show you how to best add more progressive web app features and implementing each with its own JavaScript so that you reduce the number and/or size of JavaScript scripts loaded on the first page load.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 31 January 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/257737169/

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 talk I will cover a bit of the what, how, and why of the Entity Component Systems (ECS) architecture, its focus on data oriented design, and its rapid adoption within the game industry. I will also talk over some pros and cons to entity component systems that I have run into and demo the new ecsy package, "a highly experimental Entity Component System for the web" JavaScript implementation of the entity component system pattern from the Mozilla mixed reality team. I hope you are as excited as I am!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 21 November 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/266202004/

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

This talk will cover what graphql is and why you should know it and how to get started using the apollo client in your application. It will talk about very basic concepts of graphql and if you are still awake we can touch on the advanced topics. We will be working through an application and slowly introduce concept commonly used in Graphql I will hopefully showcase how easy it is to get started and maybe it will be practical enough to get you started in integrating it in your applications today or tomorrow depending how practical it is for you when you read this description.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 21 November 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/266202004/

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

Everybody wants an app. And many people want at least two - one for Android and one for ios. Needless to say, this gets expensive. Enter ReactNative (and friends).

These days there are quite a few different ways to build a cross platform application. In this talk I'll compare and contrast a few different cross-platform mobile development tools and techniques. The plan here is to give you a non-biased view of that landscape and tell you a little bit about when ReactNative would be a good choice.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 31 October 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/264749460/

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

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 31 October 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/264749460/

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

It's bed time, you change into your pyjamas, turn off the lights and climb into your warm bed. As you are about to fall asleep, you get a message from your neighbour, your garage door is open.

This happens to us all the time. So we come up with solutions like home automation. We spend tons of money on smart hubs and devices that collect data about us. We install apps on our phones without questioning whether this information is stored securely.

What if I told you, there was another way? Mozilla WebThings is a platform for connecting, monitoring and controlling devices over the internet. It is an open source implementation of emerging Web of Things standards at the W3C. The WebThings Gateway is there so that you can see everything in your smart home just by visiting a website. Using the WebThings Framework we can create our own custom components to connect to the Gateway and automate all of the things!

Join me in this talk, where I will show you how easy, secure and affordable it can be to get your house online!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 19 September 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263939320/

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

Nx is a set of extensible dev tools for monorepos, which helps you develop like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
It will allow you to develop multiple apps both frontend and backend which reside on the same repo and can share the same library code, the same assets, and the same models.
It works well for large apps with large teams for effectively managing their shared dependancies, complete with a visual display for your depenancy graphs.
Nx will even go further to recompile and re-run the tests for app the apps the are affect by a change in dependancy, making working in a large team more efficient and less prone to errors.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 19 September 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263939320/

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

NextJS is a new a upcoming framework that puts a server-side rendering spin on ReactJS framework. While it is a powerful framework, it is not very well known. We have chosen to use NextJS as our primary front-end framework and we can definitely see the fruits of this choice such as better performance in terms of time to interactive among others. I will talk about why we have chosen NextJS, what projects we have used it in and show an analysis of the increased performance that the NextJS framework offers.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 22 August 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263022807/

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

I'm going to provide a brief overview of my journey to functional programming, and my rationale behind picking Clojure as my language of choice. I will briefly talk about my perceived advantages and disadvantages of using Clojure. I'll try to briefly and gently show core Clojure concepts, and then we'll implement a rudimentary event sourcing engine using Clojure. The engine will borrow heavily from Redux so that participants have a common ground from which to build their understanding of what we're doing. Lastly, we'll run it on Node!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 22 August 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263022807/

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

"Photoshop" apps allow us to add filters to pictures: effects like blur, sharpen, edge detection, colour segmentation, etc. are all options in these apps, but how does your computer understand how to do this?

Using my interactive slides, I will explain how your computer derives meaning from a grid of numbers (called pixels), how it detects simple features in the image, and then manipulates pixels according to what the user demands. Pay close attention and you will be able to create your own image filters 😉

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 24 July 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263022711/

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

Aurelia is a modern, front-end JavaScript framework for building browser, mobile, and desktop applications. It focuses on aligning closely with web platform specifications, using convention over configuration, and having minimal framework intrusion. Aurelia allows you to write the code you want to write without the framework getting in your way.

In this talk I will discuss the ease of learning the framework, its high performance, its reactive binding, its extensibility and whatever else I can think of!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 24 July 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/263022711/

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

NestJS is a progressive Node framework written in Typescript. It's opinionated and has a tonne of features out of the box. I'm going to run through the pros and cons of using this framework over others that exist in the Node ecosystem and give a couple of real-world examples where we've found it useful in our business... And where we've found it to hinder our progress and introduce complexity.

It plugs in perfectly with Angular and follows a very similar structure in terms of the modular approach and dependency injection. I'll run through how we can share models between our backend and frontend projects (and the potential dangers around that) as well as how we wrap this all into Docker containers and ship it off to production.

If you're looking for a scalable Node framework for future projects or just trying to find how people bring up full stack applications in a couple of hours, this is a talk you don't want to miss!

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on 20 June 2019.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/261100011/

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