RSConf: Review and video frontend conference in Minsk

The Rolling Scopes is a Minsk community of front-end / javascript developers. We are engaged in conducting meetings, workshops and Q & A sessions. And this year they have grown to the level, I’m not afraid to say this word, an international conference . Our 20th event was larger than the rest. In this connection, I would certainly like to share the details of the meeting, the atmosphere and, of course, the materials.

January 31st: the day of workshops

On the eve of the event, according to probably already generally accepted European practice of holding such events, it was decided to arrange a day of practical training. Admission was free for all those who bought a ticket for RSConf.

ReactJS has long been driving and beeping, and we could not pass by. Viktor Khomyakov volunteered to show how to manage this framework, helped create the first “reactive” application, and answered the questions of developers who had already started the reactor.
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Unfortunately, there were no videos of the workshops, so you can download the source code ( here and here ) and try to figure it out yourself.

Victor Naumann grabbed the baton from Victor. In more detail the speaker will be presented later. The theme of the workshop is 3D, WebGL and the ThreeJS library.



As a result, everyone got something like this rotating illuminated cube with the RS logo on the edges:



Blanks for Martin can be downloaded here .

The first day was completed by Andrey Listochkin. Usually his NodeJS session lasts a whole day, but this time he was given only 2.5 hours, which he spent vigorously communicating with those present, deftly leading the conversation topics to the right audience. - Want security? - You are welcome. - pefomans? - No question at all.



In a word, it was great to get together, to get acquainted with the speakers and participants already on the eve of the main event, and, of course, to learn useful information, having immediately mastered it in practice.

- Who goes to RSConf tomorrow?

February 1: RSConf main day

The conference was unanimously decided to do in one thread: one problem of choosing between two overlapping sections of interesting reports became less. The lanyards of the participants were distinguished by their national style and were given a kind of Belarusian flavor. A conference program was printed on the back. It is practical, convenient and it was not necessary to remind every time who is our next speaker. There were also stickers of four colors, a branded conference jersey with a snowflake and memorable badges. Here, in fact, of which consisted of the whole set of the participant. No razdatok with booklets, no hiring and exchange of electronic boxes for candy.

Hakon Wium Lie: Why CSS was invented

The conference opened to honor the Norwegian Hakon Wim Lee. More precisely, it was our honor that CTO Opera Software decided to fly to Minsk and participate in the local front-end movement. True, it is a pity that it was not possible to communicate with him in person. The plane from Oslo to Riga was delayed a bit, and Hakon did not have time for a connecting flight to the capital of Belarus. Therefore, the program was a little shuffled and an online broadcast from the Latvian capital was organized for the report.

Some facts about the speaker:
- worked at CERN hand in hand with Tim Berners Lee;
- creator of CSS;
- activist of W3C web standards in general (video, web fonts, Acid2, etc);
- Member of the Norwegian Pirates Party;
- launched an advertising campaign in Oslo against high-rise buildings and advertising on the streets;
- owns its own farm and woodworking workshop;
- his name is quite difficult to pronounce , especially the English-speaking part of the population, so howcome became such an oversimplification.

Hakon himself is a very positive person. He very easily reacted to the frustrations of fate that forced him to read a report from Riga, and in the morning began to set the tone of the conference, smiling affably at the camera from the hotel room and skillfully working with the public even at such a distance. The report was relish imbued with rare photos from CERN, the history of the creation of www and specifically CSS.

Video of the report (up to the 11th minute there will be a greeting from the organizers, then - the speech of Hakon):

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer: Using ECMAScript 6 today

Axel is a programmer with 30 years of experience in web development since 1995, the organizer of the Munich community frontend, the speaker at major conferences, his blog 2ality.com is very popular in the world of Java scripters. He also writes books and conducts trainings for developers.

With surprising ease, he responded to the offer to speak in Minsk and, long before the conference, began to learn Russian (upon arrival, of course, he mastered the phrases in Belarusian).

A video of its one and a half hour slot on aspects of ES6 from the Minsk conference was included in the weekly javascriptweekly.com selection. As a result, at the moment it was watched by about 5 thousand users. We offer you to understand in detail ECMAScript 2015.

Part I:



Part II:

Martin Naumann: the web of today and tomorrow - WebGL and WebVR

Martin is a very cool and energetic speaker. Having met him at the SpainJS conference two years ago, we simply could not help inviting him to RSConf. He literally flooded us with ideas of reports and happily agreed to hold a workshop on the eve of the conference. As a result, we chose virtual reality - a very interesting thing that has not yet entered our everyday life, but in the near and foreseeable future will undoubtedly become part of our life.

Martin is working on a Swiss startup that specializes in developing projects on WebGL. In particular, he is currently engaged in a project of virtual furniture arrangement according to the model of your apartment. Very useful thing when moving or settling in a new house.

In Martin's report - a lot of demos (his project, Leap Motion, WebGL prettiness), a bit of coding on Three.js and of course a permanent line of questions / answers on Web Virtual Reality:



Then suddenly there was a lunch break. At this time, front-end vendors not only refueled for further assimilation of conference materials. As Martin said in his report, the organizers in some magical way nakutili Oculus Rift, and although they could not connect his project because of the unstable assembly of FIREFOX VR, people could try the standard demos and walk around the virtual room, try to sit on the chair that Oculus so realistically conveyed that it was easy to fall on the very real floor.



Another fun was the collection of bits of HTML-tags. Fortunately, every Lanyard had its own letter, and we had to cooperate, parse the audience and search for the right person. How we assembled the “blockquote” for us is still a mystery.



The guys in the next photo decided to make it better, and if the tags don't even smell here, then the phrase is just fire! Quite real contenders for victory. After all, for her everyone will be a free ticket to the next RSConf. In our group in FB there will soon be a vote for the best photo, of which there were a lot. And it's not about censorship!



One hour passed quickly, and it was time to return to the reports again.

Kirill Demura: Aperiodic tiling

Cyril is a CSS nerd that can animate everything that moves in the browser. As part of the lightning report at the conference, he spoke about his sudden passion, the theses of which are presented below:

- How to generate an avatar to the user by his ID;
- What is the parquet (periodic, non-periodic and aperiodic), what are they for, how to work with it and use it;
- What does chemistry have to do with parquet?
- Analysis of the game “Life” on aperiodic parquet floors.

The presentation is very colorful, detailed and not simple:

Juha Paananen: FRP with Bacon.js

Hot Finnish guy Juha is an adherent of functional reactive programming in the javascript world, the creator of the most popular FRP-library BaconJS.

Live coding and demos on BaconJS, the philosophy of this library and the whole approach firsthand from Juha Paanen:

Andrey Listochkin: Ember = Angular = React

Andrei flew to us from Kiev. He is an active participant and organizer of the Ukrainian frontend community, participates in hackathons and conducts trainings. His report was the most fun, and even with a holivar title, excellent presentation and deep essence. It parses and removes the bones of the architectures and design on each of the three frameworks declared.

The last 5 minutes of the report the equipment set on fire, but Andrey’s slides can be found here .

Dmitry Lomov: Javascript with the speed of light

Dmitry Lomov (Google, Munich) has been programming for two decades and managed to work at JetBrains, Microsoft and Google. He is currently involved in the development of V8 / Blink, and is also a member of the JavaScript Standardization Committee (Ecmascript) TC39 from the Google V8 team.

In the report, Dmitry talks about the intimate details of the work of the V8, as well as what problems the platform faces and how it can be solved. “Use stricter + types” is a new best friend of js-optimizer. In his presentation, Dmitry gives the answer to the following question: why do we need SoundScript with live TypeScript, Dart, Flow, which V8 team plans to support. Dr. Axel Rauschmaier wrote an article directly in Minsk based on the report and put it on his blog. Still, it is very pleasant that the participants of RSConf were the first public audience (immediately after the javascript committee in Mountain View), who heard about the innovations and was able to ask Dmitry's tricky questions.

Video report:



At the conference there was a simultaneous translation of reports from English into Russian, and vise-versa. Headsets were not particularly popular: only 10 percent of the participants gave their ID in exchange for a translation of the translator who had already begun to understand the development (the fact is that he had already translated two conferences on the frontend in Minsk, and I think that he is quite capable of writing the site ). True, Severin Kistner from Munich checked out the device.


An interesting fact: the ticket to the conference cost $ 30, and Severin gave 180 € for a blue-visa for a visa that does not make you crave for new knowledge. In general, he really liked the selection of speakers, and he will definitely come to Minsk again to the event of this level. It was worth it, Seva!

Gregor Adams: Discovering fractals with CSS

RS Crew was at the dotCSS conference in Paris and got acquainted with the work of Gregor Adams. After his then bright presentation, insidious plans immediately appeared to invite him to Minsk. Just look at Adam's work on CodePen . Incredible things on CSS.

At the conference, his report was great to unload the information flow from previous speakers, and gradually the falling asleep part of the hall cheered up from sleep. Fortunately, the fractals dancing to “Sail” were worth it: beautiful, dynamic, inspiring.

CSS Quiz

The competition from Sasha Gerasimov completed the official part of the conference.

Its meaning was this: the participants open the link in the browser. On the web sockets, the client connects to the server, and it logs into the system. After everyone has done the previous step, the presenter gives a go-ahead, presses the button in his admin panel, and tasks are simultaneously sent to the participants.

An example of one of the tasks looks like this:



The essence is simple: the user in the submitted layout must select the highlighted html-tags. Two minutes are given for the passage of the stage, the time of each participant is fixed, and the first is given a point, the second is given two, and so on. After 10 stages, the entire amount is adjusted, and at the smallest participants are ranked in the final protocol.

Of course, without magic and problems it didn’t happen at all - there were such selectors that collapsed the backend, and if after one restoration of the system the game continued further, then someone would send the unfortunate selector all the time, and they decided to sum up the result with the current results.

By the way, the front-ends of the scissor arm fought not just for respect or virtual honor, but there was also quite a material prize - Google ChromeBook Pixel, presented to the winner by PandaDoc (our long-time acquaintances and partners).



Quiz sources will be uploaded to our githab , but only after JS Quickdraw has been completed.

Afterparty

We, as the organizers, did not bother much, and especially at the height of the budget crisis, there was no large-scale Minsk-Arena holding, so BeerJS started with a delicious draft that warmed up the degree of discussion and the ability to communicate even during the quiz. Thanks to photoboxing, participants could immediately take home evidence of where they were all on Sunday, February 1. It was possible to make just such a photo with the speakers:


Axel says this: do you use ES6 # right now?

February 5, Workshop "Improving Smashing Magazine's Performance: A Case Study"

The conference was so intense that the workshop of Smashing Magazine editor Vitaly Friedman did not fit on the main day of the conference. But as the saying goes, whatever is done is all for the better: one hour of the workshop participants would be short. Therefore, on February 5, on Thursday (the traditional day for our meetings), he told us in two and a half hours how SmashingMagazine managed to achieve 100 points in PageSpeed ​​for mobile devices.

Slides and photos

All presentations, photos and video reports are carefully added to the conference review page.

What gives us the strength to go on

Plus a small review from Pavel Drobushevich’s RSConf member can be found here .

The feedback collected through the form and the feedback left during the conference let us know that we are going in the right direction and are moving the whole js-development community forward. Thank you for your participation and warm words, nothing would have happened without you!

Finally

As you understood, this was not the last event here. In February, the 15th mitap was already held, in the near future there will be workshops on Polymer and ES6.

Thank you for reading the note to the end.



It was cool. See you soon, friends! Let's Roll!