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“JS is becoming more mature”: interview with the HolyJS 2018 Moscow program committee

How can a JS developer spend time on weekends lazily, but at the same time with benefits? Watch the online broadcast of HolyJS: and learn something new, and you won't have to leave home.

And on the eve of the conference, we asked questions to the HolyJS program committee: the people on whom it depends, which reports can be seen. How do they see the right program "conference for JS-developers"? What can get into it and what not? How to deal with the difficulties?


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Participated in the conversation:

Eugene bunopus Cat
Dmitry DmitryMakhnev Makhnev
Vadim bmsdave Gorbachev
Alexey zolotyh Zolotykh
Andrei real_ales Dmitriev

In addition to them, Ekaterina cakeinpanic Pavlenko and Mikhail v1r Poluboyarinov also worked on the program.

JUG.ru Group: JavaScript has a reputation as an “ecosystem where the framework is changed every week,” but it is clear that this is an exaggerated stereotype, and React has already turned five years old. And when you look at an ecosystem from the point of view of a program committee that needs relevant material, how quickly does everything change in it? Are there reports on the new HolyJS that six months ago could not have happened in the previous one?

Alexey Zolotykh: Well, specifically about the frameworks, we have no reports, the program is about something else.

Dmitry Makhnev: Although the main pillars (React, Angular, Webpack, Vue) appeared quite a long time ago, a lot of things happen and change around them. A new version of Webpack has been released - on the one hand, this is the same Webpack, and on the other, a lot has changed. Recently there was a very serious release from React, they changed some hooks of the life cycle of components, which greatly changed a lot. And so on

Evgeni Kot: Specifically, not very many frameworks and loud names appear. But there are trends: something is becoming more popular now, and three years ago they talked less about it. For example, we will have a report from Bartosz Pietrucha on how to make a Nintendo-controller out of a smartphone using JavaScript and machine learning. As well as the Isa Silveira report specifically about machine learning and AI, this topic has become so popular and simple in the world of JS and the frontend not so long ago.

Alexey: But in general, among applications for reports, there is more than what is actually used in production. Now the stage is not rapid growth, but the support of the existing one.

Evgeny: Perhaps this is due to the fact that HolyJS has some positioning: reports of the level “Hello world! See, I started a new library ”will no longer fit. The conference is a little about something else

Dmitry: Regarding some new pieces. For example, Vitya Vershansky will tell about asynchronous hooks in the node. They have appeared recently, they solve quite complex problems, but they have not yet settled down to the end.

Alexey: But this topic is connected with the problems that people face in production. That is, it is not "toys", but something that works.

Vadim Gorbachev: I would add the answer by the fact that the wave of holivars between the frameworks has already calmed down, now the look and interest has been aimed at other, more applied and sensible sides. It seems to me that now the work of the W3C, TC39 and others has become very visible. What they do, what is accepted in the standards. Proposals are very well lit, one feels that JavaScript itself is becoming more mature.

Dmitry: I would like to add that we are really growing up. A lot has been heard lately about types. We get about 18 in terms of development. For example, Vyacheslav Shebanov will help us to become much older and tell not just about how he screwed Flow, but really about the theory of types from which it originated.

Eugene: Do you think that now javaskripter, figuratively speaking, go to college?

Dmitry: I would say, prepare for the exam.

Andrei Dmitriev (program director): They will go to the army!

JUG.ru Group: - From the new in the program you can still notice Flutter. And for the conference with “JS” in the title, this is the “borderline” topic: javascriptters will tell you how to write on Dart for iOS and Android. The question arises: where exactly is the boundary of topics suitable for HolyJS? Why did you decide to take this report?

Dmitry: Mobile development is somehow important, especially at the moments when you want to try to make your startup. Because without mobile development, nowhere, applications are still necessary to write. And no matter how much everyone shouted about PWA, we all see where PWA is located. We all remember the experiments with React Native, wonderful articles from our colleagues from Airbnb, a report on HolyJS by Dmitry Patsura about the nuances of React Native. What happens to Vue Native is just one of the transformations of React Native. A lot of problems remain.

Nevertheless, the guys from the frontend still want to somehow try to write mobile applications. Still, Java is Java, and Objective-C and Swift are Objective-C and Swift, and there are a lot of nuances. Again, I want to do it cross-platform. Flutter now shoots very strongly due to this, not only in frontend communities, but also in many places, because it allows you to do it cross-platform. No matter how hard we feel, Dart is pretty close to JS compared to Java or Objective-C. For a modern fronterer, the threshold for entering there, it seems to me, will be easier than sorting out Java and Gradle to download an Android application. Therefore, it looks like an interesting enough thing you want to show people to solve some of their problems. And this is not a hard PR project from Zhenya, but a conscious choice.

Eugene: The purpose of my life: so that everyone understands that Dart is not a bastard! I can supplement Dima. Of course, for HolyJS this is a report “on the verge of availability”. But here what Dima said and the personality of the speaker also played a role. Ari Lerner is a very interesting person, we interviewed him for Habr . He is the programmer of the old school, the most difficult. He wrote books about Angular, AngularJS, React, React Native, Vue - something in collaboration, something himself. He takes the technology that he is interested in, analyzes it to the very giblets, writes a book about it and makes some reports, talks about what he has learned.

It may look strange that the author of ng-book talks about Flutter: where is one, and where is another? But he is really cool because he takes technology, bites into it to the bone, turns it inside out and then talks about what he found and saw. To him a lot of respect for that. It seems to me that he will be able to give something interesting for developers who have not even thought about the need for mobile development. Now mobile applications are used more often than desktop.

Dmitry: I would also like to add to this that for a long time we positioned ourselves as a conference exclusively on JS, and there were some nuances in the formation of programs, as well as people approached and asked: "Why is this, JS does not live in a spherical vacuum." For example, if we look at the Node, there you can (and sometimes they really do) write on the pros. I have a good friend who built most of the Node.js production infrastructure in one rather big company, and they really saw a lot on Node.js, but when I started a project where performance was needed, I sat down to write on the pros and did it consciously . I hope that the next HolyJS we will get him out with a report on this.

Eugene: Oh times, about morals! Java scripters write in C ++!

Dmitry: Yes, but what if life forces? So we changed the positioning. Now we are a conference for JS developers. I would like to start to show people some world around, because a lot of experience, for example, from Java can be applied to us. Especially with how we are starting to get angry by type. Once you need a mobile application, and you have to go climb there. Once we need to work with binary data, even in the browser, we have to go into such things. The general expansion of the outlook after the conference is also very important. We are starting to take some steps in this direction, in addition to the JS field.

Vadim: In general, this is a long time in HolyJS. For example, when Kohl Ryzhikov told how to write JS in PostgreSQL. I think that the public is not surprised by the fact that HolyJS is spoken not only about JS.

Dmitry: Now we do it more consciously and more freely than before.

JUG.ru Group: One of the eternal problems of all conferences in the world is the cancellation of a report shortly before the event due to force majeure (for example, the speaker’s illness). What are you doing in this situation?

Yevgeny: In preparation for the conference, we conduct voting within the program committee, which reports we take, and which ones - no. And those reports that are "slightly undercooked", become spare. We invite these speakers to the conference, they receive all the same benefits as the main speakers. They come to her, but by default do not act, becoming a fallback. And with the abolition of some report adopted in the program, we immediately include a fallback option. And these speakers, we, as well as those who have been accepted into the program, train, conduct, and work with them. Due to this, even if the replacement takes place at the last moment, we have a qualitative report, and not something that was made hastily, just to plug a hole in the schedule.

Dmitry: Probably now for the first time in my practice, when the speakers agreed to this in large numbers, for which they would like to thank you so much.

JUG.ru Group: If the speaker does not speak at the conference as a result and remains “on the bench”, but his report was actively working and there were runs, it may be worthwhile to take a video of the last run and publish it on YouTube?

Yevgeny: It seems to me that this is not the same thing, because, after all, the report to a large audience has some other energy.

Alexey: I agree with Zhenya. I recently had a case at the audition when a person said that he did not feel the energy. It's hard to perform when there are no eyes of the audience and their energy, you foolishly feel yourself.

Vadim: But the speakers do not make this preparation for nothing. The content is accumulated, formalized, and even if it does not work on the HolyJS site, the speaker can easily go with this preparation and speak at another conference.

JUG.ru Group: Now HolyJS offline tickets are already sold out, but the opportunity remains to watch the broadcast. It is clear that the viewers of the broadcast are missing the communication taking place at the site - and what's the difference, what else can you get only “live”?

Dmitry: There are a number of things that are not broadcast, for example, the BoF sessions at the end of the first day: these are discussions with the participation of speakers devoted to a specific topic. Anyone can take part in them, the main thing is to stay within the framework of the discussion, and not come with any questions of their own (there are discussion zones for this).

Evgeny: If, for example, you work in a company where there are 10-15 front-tenders, and you discuss how to make a state in your large application, then no one will say: “I have this, and what do you have? I don't care ". BoF, in fact, looks like we are going as a “common front-end team” and trying to solve a problem or discuss our opinions.

We will have three BoF sessions : about Node.js, the state on the client side and the developer tools.

Boh about Noda went very well last time, so we raise the topic again. It so happened that we have many speakers at the conference this year directly related to Node - Thomas Watson, Ujjwal Sharma. Here the subject matter is obvious: Node.js, that around where it goes, how it develops. The moderator will be Nikolai Matvienko, whom viewers of past HolyJS may remember as a speaker (for example, here is his report from the St. Petersburg HolyJS).

The status is the same: interesting, because Michel Weststrate, the creator of MobX and MobX-state-free, and Erik Rasmussen, the creator of Redux-Form, will take part. In general, states as a concept may seem like a rather narrow topic, but everyone uses them, everyone somehow stores some state on the client. And who better to know the best practices in this regard, if not these speakers? Viktor Grishchenko will also take part there - and he is “the father of the Russian CRDT”.

Dmitry: And about the third bof, about the tools. First, we will have Aleksey Kozyatinsky, who does a lot to work with JS in Chrome DevTools. Accordingly, it will be possible to ask him about all the corners of Chrome DevTools, which are associated with JS. Kirill Cherkashin from the Firebase project, positioning himself as a collection of a large number of tools. There will be Stas Kurilov, who does with the Webpack the hell that the plugin writes to him. For all questions regarding the Webpack, it can be terrorized deeply enough. There will be Roman Dvornov, he has done a lot of tools, a lot of things about the design of the systems, and how to build them based on the analysis of React-components on AST.

Eugene: Remember the Inspector Gadget? I think Roman Dvornov - Inspector Gadget of the Russian front end.

Dmitry: And Vitaly Slobodin is a person who was finishing off support for PhantomJS. PhantomJS is a tool on which a huge number of tools were based for testing something in a browser. Vitali earlier on HolyJS talked about headless browsers.

Alexey: This is one of those cases where pride takes after you know that the person who did it is from Russia.

JUG.ru Group: And finally. Since you, unlike us and readers, have already seen the reports, say something about something that is especially close to you - perhaps, thanks to you, some viewers will not miss the interesting performances.

Dmitry: It is very difficult to single out one report, because this time the program turned out to be very interesting for me. But first of all I would like to mention the report of Vyacheslav Shebanov “Type system in a nutshell,” I spent his first run and did not understand about half of the words there. This is a very cool report, where on almost every slide you want to go to Wikipedia and read. Nevertheless, in the course of the report the words become clear, and this is very interesting.

And I'll highlight Theodore Vorillas report on accessibility in real life. Actually, I am very hard on accessibility applications, because I have to deal with them at work, and when an evangelist comes out and talks about the existence of ARIA tags - this is, of course, wonderful, but everyone does that. And here all the same about how to make some kind of piece of iron that would help people read. To be honest, I was very struck by the statistics revealed at the beginning of this report: how many people need it.

Eugene: For my part, of course, this is Ari Lerner about Flutter. This will be the only report with Dart on the slides. But beyond that, the interesting report by Lucas Da Costa about functional programming. When I watched the run, I also got into a situation when I didn’t see anything familiar on the slides. But the highlight of this report is that it is like some kind of sophisticated cocktail that covers in half an hour. I looked, did not understand a damn thing, and then sat down, and I had an insight: wow, damn, cool! Therefore, I recommend to go. If after this report you go out and walk around with a bemused look, then you will be covered normally.

Alexey: I almost fell in love with the report on machine learning, I am expecting a lot from him. And I also liked both reports about accessibility - both from Theodore, and “Development of available graphs” .

Vadim: As the saying goes: “Talk is cheap. Show me the code. In Chrome, you can double-click Ctrl + Shift + i (on Mac - Cmd + Shift + i), call DevTools on DevTools and see its source ... Look before
talk about the protocol Chrome DevTools.

JUG.ru Group: Thanks for the answers!

The HolyJS webcast has two options. First, the free broadcast of the first hall of the first day: it will be available to all simply on YouTube. And secondly, paid , giving access to all reports of both days (both live and recorded after the conference).

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/430854/


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