JSFoo 2013 – Day 2

This post is a summary of the talks from Day-2 of JSFoo. Check out Day-1 talks here. The second day of JSFoo started with the most awaited talk of the conference. It was the talk by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) of Mozilla. He gave a keynote address on the topic "HTML5 for the masses - Making the Future the Now" and impressed the crowd who have gathered there early on a Saturday morning.

JSFoo 2013 – Day 1

JSFoo is a JavaScript conference organized by the awesome folks at HasGeek. JSFoo 2013, held on 20^th and 21^st of Sept, is the fifth edition after four successful runs in 2011 and 2012. The focus of this year’s edition was original creations with JavaScript. A series of workshops was also conducted before the conference. My full-time talk proposal (Building components using Polymer) didn’t get selected this time. There were lots of interesting talks and demos on both the days. There was a good number of International speakers this year. The turn around for the conference was quite high. When I walked into the auditorium, I had to spend quite sometime to find a place to sit. The videos of all the talks can be found here – Day-1, Day-2. Attaching the screenshots of mind map I have created during the conference. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Bringing the Open Web and APIs to mobile devices with Firefox OS

Speaker: Robert Nyman(@robertnyman)

Robert Nyman kick-started the conference with a keynote on Firefox OS. This was one of the sessions I was looking forward to. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to the venue on time and had to miss this session completely (thanks to the delayed overnight journey). I am yet to catch up this session on HasGeek TV.

Frontend Dev Ops

Speaker: Aditya Yadav (@NetRoy)

In this session, Aditya talked about the evolution of tools in managing the web applications. He called for the developers to automate various processes involved in managing the web apps – deployment, flushing cache, performance tweaks, writing clean code, etc. He also briefly talked about some of the deployment models being used in the industry.

Generating tests from code – or How to test better and faster

Speaker: Olivier Crameri (@Oliviercramieri)

This was one of my favorites of the day. I have learnt some new about testing. Olivier talked about his research work based on the concept of Symbolic Execution and how to use it to automate the generation of test cases. He also talked a bit about the solvers they are using at BugBuster. Then, he demonstrated Unite, a tool for generating unit tests from the code. The demo looked cool as the tool generated some of the test cases for a regular expression. However, I am not sure about the completeness of the test cases though. I am gonna spend sometime on this to get a better understanding of the concept of Symbolic Execution. Thanks Olivier.

Real-Time peer-to-peer collaboration with JS and HTML5

Speaker: Om Shankar (@om_invincible)

In this session, Om talked about different components involved in making a peer-to-peer connection using WebRTC. He also showed some cool demos. I was looking to see more on data channel. There wasn’t much on data channels though.

JavaScript is a DJ

Speaker: Jaison Justus (@jaisonjutus)

This was the first session after lunch. Jaison engaged the audience really well with his crisp talk on WebAudio API. He showed couple of cool demos using WebAudio API. Good job bro.

Programming Flying robots

Speaker: Sreekanth Vadagiri (@sreeix)

In this crisp talk, Sreekanth showed off his AR Drone being controlled by a node app. He also demonstrated the TurleDrone which he has built. The audience were really impressed with the demos. I have got one myself last month. Yet to find a good place to fly it.

Using Camera motion detection in JS for gesture based interaction

Speaker: Vinci Rufus (@Areai51)

Vinci talked about the techniques involved in recognizing the gestures. He talked about the Blend mode difference method used for detecting the gestures. Then, he demonstrated cool apps built using getUserMedia() API. I was really impressed with the car demo which Vinci and his folks have built.

RedRaphael – JavaScript graphics library on steroids

Speaker: Sushant Sudharshan

In this talk, Sushant from Fusion Charts talked about the evolution of the graphics library RedRaphael. He talked about some the salient features of the library like Composite shapes, grouping, etc. It would have been great had he shown better demos built using the library.

Killing passwords with JavaScript

Speaker: Francois Marier (@fmarier)

This was also one of my favorites of the day. Francois talked about some of the problems with the current password system and what an ideal solution should look like. Then, he introduced Personas with the help of a short play. Personas look like an interesting concept. Need to explore more on this.

Microsoft sponsored Talk (JS / Web stuff)

Speaker: Rajasekharan Vengalil (@avranju)

In this talk, Raj talked about the some of the cool stuff we can do with JavaScript – Pointer events, Full Screen API, Secure WebGL, etc. Some of the demos (GlacierWorks.org, for example) were really awesome. Then, he talked about some of the tools for debugging the JS code – modern.ie, browserstack. The developer tools on IE seems to have improved a lot. Raj’s session was very informative. Kudos to him for picking up some of the lesser known stuffs for demo.

Bot using Node.Js and the HTML5 Audio API

Speaker: Ameya Karve (@ameyakarve)

In this crisp talk, Ameya talked about how he has used Node.js and HTML5 audio API to build his bot. Unfortunately, he couldn’t show the demo of it on stage.

Offline in the browser – with IndexedDB, AppCache and LocalStorage

Speaker: Manan Bharara (@mananbharara)

Manan talked about the different techniques available for building offline apps in his crisp talk. This was the last session of the day.

Overall the day was really good. Had some interesting conversations with fellow JS developers. Check out the summary of Day-2 here.

-- Varun

JS Foo Bangalore 2012

HTML5 makes the web so powerful that we can do almost everything on the web. Till few years back, Flash was commonly used to build rich applications. Things have changed a lot with HTML5. Browsers are also becoming powerful day-by-day. Many desktop developers have already started moving towards web based application development. JavaScript is growing to be the most important programming language. In fact, the famous Khan Academy has chosen JavaScript as the first programming language to teach. As a developer, how do we keep track of the latest happenings? Though there are many online forums (like HTML5Rocks) to help us, the best way to learn is to hang out with fellow developers and the experts from the field. JS Foo is a tech event, organized by the good guys at HasGeek, which facilitates the interaction between JavaScript developers.

About JS Foo

JS Foo is India’s only conference on JavaScript, with editions in Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. It brings together JavaScript developers from different parts of the country, to share their learnings and help others transition to JavaScript. The highlight of the conference is its transparent system of public submission and voting on sessions. Participants have the control over the sessions to be part of the event. Yes, you can go to http://funnel.hasgeek.com/jsfoo/ to suggest a new session or vote for a session which you like. The schedule for the event will be prepared based on that.

About HasGeek

HasGeek is India’s first and only professional, community-focused technology event organizer. It was founded by Kiran (popularly known as @jackerhack) in 2010. HasGeek creates discussion space for geeks to collaborate. HasGeek has organized many successful events in the past like DocType HTML5, JS Foo, AndroidCamp, DroidCon, Meta Refresh, etc. I have personally attended some of their past events and really enjoyed them. Believe me, these guys are really awesome. :)

JS Foo Bangalore 2012

The fourth edition of JS Foo is happening in Bangalore on 19th -20th of October 2012. The theme for this edition is JavaScript everywhere. People are pushing the limits of what can be done with JavaScript on the server, in embedded devices, and in its original home, the browser. You can share your experience working with JavaScript and you can listen to the best practices in code and working style from the experts.

Date: Oct 19-20, 2012
Venue: NIMHANS Convention Centre, Dairy Circle, Bangalore
Pre-requisite: Basics of web development. You don’t have to be an expert in JavaScript.
Registration: http://jsfoo-2012.doattend.com/
Site: http://jsfoo.in (Site is still showing information about previous edition).

My Experience

I have attended the third edition of JS Foo in Chennai. It was an awesome experience. Learnt a lot of new stuffs. Check out my blog post to know about my experience at JS Foo Chennai 2012. You can also find the videos from previous editions here. I will be attending the event and might even give a talk on JS tools (http://funnel.hasgeek.com/jsfoo/). Hope to see you all at the event.

-- Varun

Google DevFests India 2011

Google has been organizing many developer events across the globe to meet the developers and understand their expectations. DevFest is one such event which provides a great opportunity to learn more about Google technologies and developer products. Developer advocates and engineers from Google will be present at the event. This will be an useful forum for the developers to interact with Google engineers. The event is open to all. There are only limited seats. Register here.

Event  : Google DevFest 2011

Venue : The Lalit Ashok Bangalore
Date    : Sep 15, 2011 08:30 - 17:00

Venue : HICC and Novotel, Hyderabad
Date    : Sep 17, 2011 08:30 - 17:00

More details here.

-- Varun

Google India Engineering Tech Talk series

Google’s Engineering Productivity team is organizing a special event with talks by Google Engineers on October 27th at Google offices in Hyderabad and Bangalore. The theme for the talks will be Engineering at Google. The talks will focus on different phases (Design / Development / Coding / Testing and Release) of Engineering at Google and how the Engineering Productivity team executes on its mission of accelerating Google Engineering. Time: Wednesday, 27th Oct, 4:30 PM. Limited seats. Register here.

Talk 1

Web Testing at Google – Infrastructure for the world’s most demanding web developers – by Ted Mao. This talk will focus on the infrastructure Google has built to support web testing and how this infrastructure evolved as the web testing needs increased in scale and complexity.

Talk 2

Leveraging feedback and analysis to improve development process – by Brad Green. Brad will demonstrate two Google products Google Feedback and RoundUp using which they collect the feedback from hundreds of millions of users and identity the focus area after outages.

Talk 3

Tools for Continuous Integration at Global Scale – by Nathan York. This talk covers the key insights and technical design elements that enable us to scale the word’s largest continuously integrated code base to thousands of engineers worldwide.

Talk 4

Testing at Google – Dr. James Whittaker. James will focus on how the testing is done at Google to ensure the quality of the products.

Venue:

• Google India Pvt Ltd, DivyaShree Omega, Hitech City, Hyderabad.
• Google India Pvt Ltd, RMZ Infinity – Tower E, Old Madras Road, Bangalore.

More details and registration can be found here. Google's Engineering Productivity team is also hosting an invite-only event called GTAC in Hyderabad on Oct 28th and 29th.

-- Varun

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities.

Past Grace Hopper Celebrations (in the United States) have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration is a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

This is the first time the program is being held in India, especially for Indian women. It will be held at The Taj Residency, Bangalore Dec 7th – 9th 2010. As part of this event, a Poster Session has been organized to provide an opportunity for an informal discussion of one’s research with the conference attendees. Furthermore, it is a forum to convey any raw ideas and results not yet developed into a full paper. The last date for the submission of Poster abstract is 15-Sep-2010. More information can be found here.

-- Varun