As cloud providers take over more and more back end operations, organizations will increasingly have larger and larger percentages of their developers working on the front end. And it’s never been easier for front-end developers to build their own scalable applications without needing a back-end developer or operations teams. This talk will walk through the modern services that make all this possible, from Google Cloud’s Firebase to AWS’s Appsync, with specific action items any front-end developer can take to be completely self-sufficient.

Joe is a serial technical co-founder, recently launching his fifth company, Branch, in March. His previous ventures have been BuildFax (acquired by DMGT), Spaceful (acquired by Xceligent), BluePrince (acquired by Harris Computer), and EphPod (acquired by Wind Solutions). Additionally, he has consulted with many other companies on software development and cloud migrations, including many in the DMGT portfolio. Joe graduated with degrees in English and Mathematics from Williams College and has a law degree from Yale Law School.

This talk will cover the basics of talking to the Slack API with a handful of Node libraries: node-fetch, ws, and express. I’ll show some incremental examples for building a (zombie horror) Choose-your-own-adventure app, and how the building blocks used for that can be extended to build a productivity app, namely an iCalendar processor that gives in-channel notifications when meetings are about to start.

We’ll cover:

• Creating personal Slack teams
• Granting auth to a new app
• Using await/fetch with bearer tokens for simple data collection and message posting
• Using WebSockets for real-time messaging
• Callbacks and triggers from user button clicks
• Registering slash commands
• Surviving the zombie apocalypse

Curtis Autery is a software engineer at Beam Dental, campus instructor for Girls Who Code, runs a coding club at Graham Expeditionary Middle School, and is an occasional speaker and mentor for the Columbus freeCodeCamp chapter.