Category Archives: Web development

[Video 283] Evan Czaplicki: User focused design in Elm

Elm is a new, statically typed, functional programming language that lets you create GUIs inside of your browser. It can communicate with JavaScript (a slightly more popular language used inside of browsers), and compiles into JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.  Elm offers a number of new ideas, alongside some old ideas put in a new context.  In this talk, Elm creator Evan Czaplicki describes his language, and how it aims to make software easier to maintain.

[Video 274] Christian Joudrey: Scaling Rails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

People love to say that “Rails can’t scale.” Perhaps Rails is more CPU and memory intensive than other frameworks (and languages), but Shopify has manged to create a successful, large-scale, scalable business based on Rails.  But even Shopify, with all of their experience, faces challenges — in particular, on the biggest shopping days of the year in the United States, known as “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday.” How do they scale their servers to deal with this massive influx of traffic? In this talk, Christian Joudrey shares many of Shopify’s ideas and approaches.

[Video 264] Erik Bryn: Ember 2.0

Ember.js, one of the best-known front-end Web development frameworks. announced its 2.0 release earlier this week. What does that mean for existing Ember developers? What can we expect to see in this version (and what hasn’t changed since previous versions)? In this talk, Erik Bryn describes the changes that went into Ember.js 2.0, and the ways in which the Ember.js core team have tried to make the transition as smooth as possible for existing developers.

[Video 241] Spike Brehm: Evolution Of Airbnb’s Frontend

AirBNB is a well-known Web application and business. They’re known not only for their business, but for a high-quality Web experience. How did AirBNB go from a small, simple, Web application with almost no serious front-end technologies to one that is using many of them, including some home-grown systems?   In this talk, Spike Brehm describes the ways in which AirBNB’s front end has changed over time, in order to handle scaling, usability, and maintenance.

[Video 234] Lacey Williams Henschel: A More Accessible Django Girls

DjangoGirls aims to introduce women (and girls) to the world of software and Web development (using Django, of course). They sponsor workshops, and offer documentation, tutorials, and other materials that encourage women to learn programming. How do Django GIrls workshops, with very small budgets, handle the issue of accessibility? What considerations do you need to keep in mind?  How does the workshop itself change? In this talk, Lacey Williams Henschel describes her experiences putting together Django Girls workshops, and tells us how others can similarly make workshops as open and inviting as possible.

[Video 221] Estelle Weyl: Mobile Web Performance

The Web is increasingly mobile; people are increasingly using phones and tablets, in addition to desktop computers.  We hear a great deal about how we thus need to take mobile devices into account in our development work — but “mobile” means much more than having a responsive site. We need to take mobile devices’ speeds, battery lives, UI, and sizes into account when considering our Web application performance. In this talk, Estelle Weyl tells us what Web developers need to know in order to develop sites that are high quality for mobile devices, as well as for the desktop.

[Video 220] Dustin Whittle: Performance Testing Crash Course

Can your Web application handle lots of traffic? If so, then how much? The best way to figure out how much traffic your application can take is to load-test it. In this talk, Dustin Whittle describes a number of open-source tools that can help you to test the scalability of your Web application, at a number of different levels and in different ways.

[Video 219] Justin Searls: As easy as Rails

Ruby on Rails makes it easy to get started writing Web applications. But perhaps it’s too easy, in that it encourages us to think in terms of server-side applications, when we often nowadays need to be thinking in terms of client-side applications. In this talk, Justin Searls describes the sorts of problems that can arise being a server-side thinker in a client-side world, and demonstrates several JavaScript-based tools (e.g., LinemanJS) that bring Rails-style and -quality development tools to JavaScript developers — and which should shake up our thinking a bit, if we’re still thinking in this way.

[Video 212] Pat Shaughnessy – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under ActiveRecord

What happens when, within a Ruby on Rails application, you use ActiveRecord to submit a query? In this talk, Pat Schaughnessy traces your query all the way through to the database (in this case, PostgreSQL), and demonstrates how much work Ruby and the database are doing. If you’ve ever wondered how much work happens when you invoke a single Ruby method, now you’ll have your answer.

[Video 208] Anton Caceres: Asynchronous Web Development with Python 3

Python 3 has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t yet found a compelling reason to move from Python 2. One feature which has been getting a growing amount of attention, and which is encouraging people to move to Python 3, is asyncio — a part of the standard library as of Python 3.4, which allows for asynchronous I/O.  But what does “asynchronous I/O” mean, how does it relate to Python, and why would I want to use it?  Moreover, how can I use it?  In this talk, Anton Caceres introduces us to asynchronous Web development in Python, which is based on Python’s generators, and which offers a new way to think about Web applications.