Let’s say you have a really popular open-source project. Let’s say that you want to provide the greatest possible performance, but that the basic installation of Ruby on Rails limits you. What can and should you do? How do you deal with this, without breaking Rails, requiring too many customizations or monkey patches, or hurting your application? In this talk, Discourse cofounder Sam Saffron describes how they handle such situations in their (amazing, in my opinion) discussion application. How do they use Rails, how do they go around it, and how do they try to improve performance?
Ember.js provides an MVC application framework for creating rich client-side apps. But Ember.js doesn’t control the Web’s infrastructure; on the contrary, it depends on them. The Web consists of many different technologies, each of which is run by a different committee or group. How can Ember.js create a stable, useful framework when Web standards are constantly changing, and run by different groups? In this talk, Matthew Beale describes the different standards bodies, how they work, and how Ember tries to push forward with development while taking the rest of the Web, and its standards, into account.
MVC (model-view-controller) is a well-known paradigm for designing applications. Ruby on Rails was one of the first Web frameworks to use MVC, basically forcing us to use MVC in order to create a Web application. MVC works great at first, but does it work over time? As our applications grow in size and complexity, does MVC still make sense? In this talk, Peter Harkins describes the sorts of problems that MVC-based applications can encounter as they grow and age — and the types of solutions that you can apply to your code, in order to make it work better, and become easier to maintain.
What do you need to know in order to be a Web developer? A great Web developer? In this talk, Kathy Sierra argues that the most important skill is being able to learn and assimilate new things quickly. New languages, new browsers, new paradigms, new considerations — you’ll always, for your entire career, need to learn new things. How can and should you learn quickly and well? And what does it mean to learn, or to become an expert?
The good news: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it possible to style your Web pages however you want. The bad news: Making CSS do what you want can get difficult, especially as your pages get increasingly complex. Lea Verou not only creates a large number of CSS-related tools, but also explains how to use CSS. Over the last few years, she has given talks about “CSS secrets,” things that might not be obvious, even to people who use CSS on a regular basis. In this talk, she describes 10 of these secrets, showing how to use the power of CSS without having to scratch your head too terribly much.
JavaScript is everywhere! It’s in browsers, but also increasingly on servers. In this talk, Kito Mann describes why JavaScript is the only language that does (and will) run in every browser — and thus why it’s the language that we increasingly need to think about. The thing is, thinking about JavaScript doesn’t mean writing in JavaScript; the talk describes several languages built on top of JavaScript, and compares their advantages and disadvantages, as well as why people would use them rather than ES6 (i.e., the new version of JavaScript).
So you created a great new Web application! That’s great, and because it’s new, it’ll be easy to maintain… until it accumulates more and more features, and data, and bloat. Someone might then suggest that you refactor your system into one using “microservices,” breaking your large, uniform system into a number of smaller ones. Microservices can indeed be helpful, but it’s important to understand what they are, and what they do. In this talk, Martin Fowler describes what a microservice is (and what it isn’t), and what we’re likely to find as we migrate toward them in our Web applications.
Learning to code is sort of like learning a foreign language; you’ll make lots of mistakes that you can laugh at (and about) later on. In this talk, Kylie Stradley points out that many of us make the same mistakes when learning to develop Rails applications — and talks about how we make such mistakes, and the long, difficult road that beginners follow when learning to program.
The Web is amazing, for sure — but it has also failed to live up to many of our (and its) initial promises. There are a lot of bad guys out there, making it unsafe for ordinary people. It’s not as secure as we would like. And of course, it’s not as fast as we would like. What does this mean, and what can we do about it? In this talk, Chris Morgan describes a number of ways in which the Web’s infrastructure can and should change, so that we can benefit even more from the Web as it currently exists. If you’re a web developer, then you’ll likely identify with many of the things mentioned in this talk. It’ll also explain some of the motivations for the Rust language, and the ways in which Rust tries to improve on other languages in all of these areas.
Sails.js is a server-side Web framework that sits on top of Node.js. It is thus built in JavaScript, allowing you to use the same event-oriented architecture in the browser and on your server. In this talk, Mike Hostetler introduces it to Web developers, demonstrating its power and scalability, its MVC structure, and the Waterline ORM. If you want to work in JavaScript on the server, but find Node.js to be too low level, then this talk can introduce you to Sails.js.