LXJS 2013 Wrap-Up

  • 6 min read

LXJS 2013 is the second edition of English conference located in Lisbon, Portugal. LXJS is an all-inclusive single track JavaScript conference spanned on two days.

To keep things short, this wrap up will be a one sentence summary per enlightening session.

Coincidentely, this milestone was my second JavaScript-only conference and my second journey in Lisbon (especially I never came back twice to the same place on my own).

Many people around me left LXJS with a huge smile on their face. And I must admit this edition is a huge success: at curating good speakers, at widening our spectrum of knowledge and most importantly, at providing an opportunity to meet genuine people among the attendees.

§Jed Schmidt

He compares his main area of expertise (translating) with his late learning field (JavaScript programming) through the concept of linguistic relativity.

As a side note, I’m happy to have met him, as I’ve authored a Chrome Packager Grunt task based on his npm module crx.

§Robert Nyman

Web Intents is about to resurrect as Web Activities, and this is a good news.

§Estelle Weyl

She showcased an interesting responsive image technique based on SVG: the Clown Car technique.

§Jonathan Lipps

Appium is an Open Source device and browser simulator to run tests on real devices and virtual devices, both locally and remotely (via your own infrastructure or via Saucelabs).

§Martin Naumann

The Second Screen W3C Working Group freshly emerged to propose a RemoteDOM spec, aiming at creating a standard for a Browser-based second screen API.

Nota Bene: this is a current field of work in our BBC R&D team.

§Tim Park

He showcased Nitrogen as his attempt to combine security, authentication and internet exposed home devices.

Nota Bene: this is a current field of work in our BBC R&D team.

§Rod Vagg

I liked the idea of LevelDB as a composable database framework, backend and infrastructure layers; and realised I always mingled IndexedDB with LevelDB.

§Dominic Tarr

A clear explanation of Scuttlebutt, Merkle Tree and Cypherlinks to illustrate that the scalability is the expression of performance changes as the size (of code, nodes and/or data) increases.

§Mike Brevoort

How Thalassa helped a slow-paced release company to become a champion in software Continuous Deployment; based on HA Proxy and Node.js.

§Ivan Babrou

How they leveraged Nginx with its cache and image resizing features to scale millions of pictures in a dozen of sizes and aspect ratio.

§Michal Budzynski

Gamepad API is the worst designed HTML5 API; when it’s implemented.

§Mark Boas

Hyperaudio is part of his quest to leverage the MediaFragment API as a way to remix and share audio/video subtitled contents in an easy way.

Nota Bene: this is a current field of work in our BBC R&D team.

§Angelina Fabbro + Bill Mills

interdisciplinaryprogramming.com is the crossroads of the strong academic knowledge (and poor UI/programming skills) and the practical-minded world of Web developers: “Sometimes you just don’t know better.”

§Aral Balkan

The concept of Continuous Client: cloud, hardware, software services and you (through the ID).

Nota Bene: i don’t understand this praise of building another-other smartphone hardware and OS (codenamed Prometheus) instead of improving Firefox OS and Fairphone.

§Dustin Diaz

“Don’t let your employer/company defining who you are.”

Remark: whereas the slideless format could have been disturbing for some folks, this sole sentence is the best piece of wisdom from LXJS. Yet we want to improve our skills and practice, our professional/personal environments are the ones helping us to feel be happy.

§Vyacheslav Egorov

Insightful JavaScript VM internals about constant propagation and loop invariant code motion; or why some JSPerf benchmarks are biased by differences among VM optimisations.

§Bert Belder

How eventually the Node.js Task API will be an easier and more natural guard to implement rather than the cumbersome Domain one.

Nota Bene: on a side note, it is also interesting to compare our startup experiences and noticing there is no much difference in raising a demi-million or several millions of cash to create a product: features don’t bring customers nor money.

§James Halliday

“Everything on npm”: from Node.js modules to C (with dotc) while also considering frontend components.

Nota Bene: i wish the node_modules folder to be renamed as npm_modules to fix our mind conception about npm.

§Domenic Denicola

The best “contribute to the Web” talk so far:

  • lurking first
  • solution time comes later
  • understanding the constraints
  • build small coalitions
  • be present
  • (and mute endless conversations leading to nowhere)

§Thank You as a gift

I initiated a ritual at Reasons to Be Creative, by offering an instant picture of inspiring people, a portrait of themselves, speaker or not speaker.
A give away on any kind of ownership of the picture, expressing my thankfulness and letting them know this gesture.

As there were really too many people to thank for, I randomly decided to attribute the picture to David Dias, one of the organiser of the conference.

A sort of reward as I really feel enthusiastic thanks to LXJS. Especially as it gave me to think about using npm over bower for frontend package management. I’ll write more about this later, the time to experiment and continue this discussion with some other folks.

§What’s next?

I’ll definitely attend LXJS in 2014. And submit a topic or two, especially as 20 minutes is a really good format (oh yes, I think I did not get bored even if I was less interested by some talks — which is a good point).

I was glad to meet a couple of new faces, like Karolis, Vyacheslav (thanks to a retweet ;-)) and Jan.

Finally, here are some hints to provide an even better LXJS 2014:

  • being on time (especially for the breaks otherwise we are starving)
  • caring about the duration: 6h of sessions in an afternoon — for a second day, after two parties — is a lot to handle
  • more time for the lunchbreak (1h is really too short, to eat and to talk)
  • being clear on the availability of a breakfast or not
  • a small detail but I had to throw 90% of the goodies except the T-shirt and a couple of stickers, because the rest was redundant (and was not fitting in my travel bag)

Oh and yes, the videos of LXJS 2013 are already available!