All Events

Guy Royse will be presenting “Agents & Arbiters - An Adventurer’s Guide to Multi-Agent Collaboration with LangGraph.js”

Building interactive systems with conventional coding means anticipating every possible user action and writing the right response for each. This quickly becomes nigh impossible. You end up lost in a maze of recursion, fragility, and nested if statements. The more interactive you make your system, the more complex your code gets, until debugging feels like being eaten by a grue—you know something’s wrong, but you’re just fumbling around in the dark.

There’s a better way. Instead of scripting every interaction, we can give some of the elements in our system their own intelligence. Multi-agent collaboration enables us to create systems in which entities can become autonomous agents with their own perspectives and voices. Imagine a text-based adventure game where the brass lantern, the white house, and even the mailbox have something to say when the player responds. Or consider a help desk system where agents from billing, technical support, and account management each weigh in to determine the best solution for a customer.

In this session, we’ll explore multi-agent collaboration through a live demo of a text-based adventure system. You’ll meet the orchestration workflow—router, classifier, agents, arbiter, and committer—and discover how LangGraph.js coordinates the chaos when multiple agents want to respond. We’ll shine our brass lantern over the code to see how it uses Redis and LangGraph.js to make it all work. Then, we’ll explore how this same approach solves real-world problems beyond gaming.

When the adventure’s over, you’ll understand how to coordinate agents to handle complex interactions and know when this is a good approach. You’ll have a working example you can adapt for your own adventures—be they exploring the Great Underground Empire, customer service platforms, or content management systems. And, you’ll never look at building interactive systems the same way again.

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI-generated) code!

Join us for Eric Rico’s talk …

TBD

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI-generated) code!

Join us for Nathan Leiberman’s talk …

Had enough of writing the same flex classes for the hundredth time? Tired of diving into your coworker’s cobbled container class? Tailwind CSS is here to save your sanity.

Tailwind gives you a well-organized, utility-first approach to styling. This CSS framework eliminates naming debates, halts stylesheet scavenger hunts, and satisfies your marketing team’s whims with clear, composable class names and a powerful configuration system. You’ll spend less time fighting CSS and more time building beautiful interfaces.

In this talk, I’ll walk through an interactive demo of Tailwind CSS and cover the following topics:

• Set up Tailwind CSS in your project
• Understand Tailwind’s utility classes and how they work
• Integrate breakpoints and dark mode like a pro
• Customizing Tailwind to fit your style
• Ditch your spaghetti stylesheets and come see how Tailwind CSS can make your project lighter, cleaner, and a lot more fun to build. Your future self will thank you.

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI-generated) code!

Join us for Ben Frain’s talk …

Ben’s book “Responsive Web Design With HTML5 and CSS” caught my attention (and should interest you as well). Find it here: https://rwd.education/

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI-generated) code!

We’re excited to launch GitHub Copilot Dev Days, a global in‑person community event series running March 15 – April 30!

Let’s come together as developers, grow our local community, and showcase the power of GitHub Copilot with free, high‑quality training materials from Microsoft + GitHub.

GitHub Copilot in VS Code GitHub Copilot CLI … and more!

• Intro Talk (30–45 min): GitHub Copilot + AI development
• Local Community Talk (30–45 min): Me (Bob Fornal)
• Hands‑on Workshop (1 hour): Practical exercises using GitHub Copilot

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI-generated) code!

Let’s get together and WORKSHOP about Job Searching and Career Management. Here are some of the content areas we can cover - expect this to change.

• Using AI effectively (search, resume).
• Job Search Tooling (i.e. TopResume, Job-Squid).
• Resume / LinkedIn Review
• Practice Interview
• Practice Elevator Pitch

GIS and Software Programming (with a focus on Python and JavaScript)

• GIS Overview
• Programming Overview
• GIS History
• History of Programming
• A Cluster of GIS Software
• A Tale of Two Programming Languages (Python and JavaScript)
• How to integrate GIS Software in Python
• How to integrate GIS Software in JS

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI generated) code!

Let’s get together and talk about Job Searching and Career Management. We may dig into some resumes, portfolios, and more. (title subject to change)

Let’s get together and learn about Navigating the Tool Selection Adventure.

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI generated) code!

[PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE FROM OUR NORMAL TIME]

Let’s get together and learn about making a Lambda function in JavaScript and deploying it on AWS.

We may dig into some code after the presentation. (title subject to change)

Bring your laptop and expect to write some (non-AI generated) code!

(NOTE THE DATE CHANGE)

Go beyond surface-level analytics and delve into the why behind user actions. Based on insights from the Product Psychology Masterclass, this talk introduces three powerful tools: harnessing storytelling for empathy, dissecting actions with the B=MAP Behavior Model, and evaluating experience value with the Psych Framework. Discover how understanding user motivations, abilities, and mental states can lead to more intuitive and successful products.

We may dig into some code after the presentation. (title subject to change)

#HACK Columbus is part of an annual global hackathon by Indigitous, a movement that brings together Christian technologists, entrepreneurs, creatives, and anyone who wants to put their faith into action that’s been hosted in more than 40 cities and 80 countries!

Whether you’re a coder, designer, marketer, nonprofit leader, project manager, or just curious how technology can help share God’s love, you’re welcome here. Come ready to connect, dream, and build with a missional focus.

Let’s get together and learn about contributing to Open Source and learn about Hacktoberfest with Matthew. We may dig into some code after the presentation. (title subject to change)

Let’s get together and learn about Cloudflare, its simplicity, and power as a tool for hackathons. We may dig into some code after the presentation. (title subject to change)

Let’s get together and learn from Robert and possibly dig into some code after the presentation. (title subject to change)

Web components have been around for a long time (since HTML 5 became a thing), but there hasn’t been a lot of attention given to them until recently. Now, tech organizations around the world are adopting them and finding tremendous efficiency in creating framework-agnostic reusable components to build their UIs.

In this talk, we will cover what web components are, how to get started with building with them, and some of the efficiencies they bring to organizations.

About Burton

I am a software engineer at Microsoft, working on one of their design systems.

I am also the creator of various open source projects including Kickstand UI (a design system built with web components - kickstand-ui.com) and Clarion (a style framework for managing design systems - projectclarion.com).

In my free time, I love spending time with my wife and three daughters, practicing martial arts, jamming on my ukulele, and learning new things (usually about software engineering).

Svelte is a compiler and component framework for building web components and web applications. It is often compared to React and Vue and fulfills many similar use cases. However, there are major differences in capabilities and framework architecture. It has some of the highest satisfaction in developer surveys, beating React, Vue, and Angular. And it beats all those frameworks on performance benchmarks too.

We will briefly talk about the benefits to users and developers of building with Svelte before diving into details. We will cover setting up a project, the special Svelte syntax, building basic components, managing the state across an app, advanced animation, and more. Hopefully, by the time you leave, you will be able to build your own highly dynamic apps using Svelte.

Join us for a brief overview of the why and how of running your server side JavaScript in a serverless environment! We’ll talk about AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda. And of course there will be demos!

Alex Markley is a technology professional with nearly twenty years of experience ranging from software engineering to infrastructure automation. Currently a Solution Architect at AWS, Alex has a passion for DevOps, Agile, and getting more done faster in the cloud.

Aircraft are everywhere. Knowing exactly where is paramount as it’s considered bad form for two aircraft to be in the same place at the same time. To avoid this, aircraft worldwide constantly and publicly broadcast their location, heading, and all sorts of other data using a system called ADS-B or Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast.

This data is a natural fit for a streaming architecture. After all, it’s a constant stream of data that is literally being broadcast in real-time. But how can we capture these broadcasts and the data within? Surely it must require expensive hardware and special tools!

Not so much. It turns out that we can capture ADS-B data easily using a combination of a cheap radio dongle and free software—a combination called software-defined radio. From there we can store it in a streaming data structure and consume, transform, and publish it using microservices. Cool, right?

In this session, you’ll learn how software-defined radio works (and not just for ADB-S), how to receive and store ADS-B data in streams, and how to use those streams with microservices. And, I’ll do it all by example—building a dashboard showing real-time flight data using Node.js, Redis Streams, and whatever front-end JavaScript framework happens to be popular that day!

Micro services are ubiquitous. However, most companies that implement micro services do not reap their full benefits - at best. At worst, it’s an epic failure.

There are reasons for micro services: independent deployment of business capabilities. However, the unspoken assumption is that you need to deploy all capabilities all the time. My experience has shown me that it’s plain wrong. Some capabilities need frequent deployment, while some are much more stable. In “the past”, we used Rule Engines to allow updating business rules without deployment. While it solved the problem, this approach had issues. Between introducing a Rule Engine and migrating your complete system to micro services, I believe that there’s a middle path, and that this path is Function-as-a-Service.

In this talk, I’ll detail every point I’ve made above, and show how one can use Serverless to pragmatically design a system that allows deploying as often as you need.

About Nicolas

Nicolas is a Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also doubles as a trainer and triples as a book author.

Follow Nicolas on Twitter at @nicolas_frankel and check out his blog at https://blog.frankel.ch.

This month, Sean Lawrenz with talk about testing observables. Check out Sean on Twitter.

Starting with a simple project design we will look at the various design considerations in several categories (initialization, components, services, event handling, build tooling, and testing) to compare and contrast the various strengths and weaknesses of Vanilla JavaScript, Angular, Vue, and React.

About Bob

Bob Fornal is Senior Solutions Developer with Leading EDJE: Husband, father, and programmer. His focus is on front-end development including:

• JavaScript
• CSS
• SVG
• AngularJS and Angular
• React
• Ionic

“Learning from my mistakes over the decades, I feel that I have become a solid programmer.”

Introduced in React 16.8, React Hooks have amped up the simplicity and conciseness of how React works.

In this talk, I will give a brief and beginner-friendly:

• introduction on what exactly are React hooks
• explain components of React hooks
• how to convert from current lifecycle methods to react hooks using examples
• explain how this has changed the way I code by giving real-life production examples

You will walk away with knowledge about how React hooks make your life simple and how you can use them in your projects.

Janhavi is a Software Engineer based in the Bay Area, interested in learning and talking about new technologies, and always open to new ideas. She likes contributing to open-source and writing articles. When not coding, she likes attending book club events, traveling, and trying out new cuisines.

Simon Prickett shows how to get started with Kaboom.js, a JavaScript library that makes building games in the browser fast and fun! We’ll start simple and build up to an adventure type game with a Node.js backend and Redis data store.

Simon is a senior software developer and technical trainer at Redis Labs. He enjoys projects that fuse hardware and software, especially with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Simon brings experience gained from living and working on three different continents in industries including banking, logistics, IoT and Software as a Service platform development.

Nobody questions building backends with Node.js anymore. It has proven itself and is widely accepted as an excellent platform for web servers. But have you ever thought of building CLI tools with Node.js? It turns out that Node.js is also great at that. Using just a few simple built-in modules, you can create powerful tools that can be used in terminals in all operating systems. In this talk, you’’ will learn how to use those modules through practical code samples and demos.

Imagine, if you will, your Manager asks you to develop a new desktop application. You’re so used to web development that you don’t know how to get started. What should you do? Dig out your old VB 6 books or learn a new technology? Better yet, keep those web skills and use Electron. Electron is the cross-platform application shell GitHub built initially for the Atom editor. The focus of this talk will allow you to leave with the starting skills to set up your development environment, generate your starter project, and build some business logic. Chris Woodruff will be your guide to leveraging your valuable skills for the desktop.

Chris Woodruff AKA Woody is the Team Leader for Developer Relations at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, which is based in Detroit, Michigan. Woody has over 25 years of experience when he started his career before the first .COM boom. He has spoken at many events across the globe, covering software development and architecture topics such as database development, APIs, and web development. He is a proven mentor who enjoys helping, educating, and supporting other developers to gain knowledge through speaking, writing, and online content. When not working or spending time with his family, you can find Woody traveling down the Bourbon Trail to find new bottles to share with friends. You can read more about Woody on his blog at http://chriswoodruff.com and follow him on Twitter at @cwoodruff.

From hands, to chisels, quills, the printing press, and now the web, a written record of our existence has been a constant throughout history. Languages, and how they are depicted, have evolved alongside the tools we use to render them. Often overlooked in design, text content is an integral part of the visual aspect of an application and CSS allows us to control and manipulate its look and feel.

In this talk we will cover a little bit about the history of typography leading up to where we are today, how to make decisions about fonts and their usage in our application, and the CSS properties that allow us to manipulate our type for a polished beautiful design.

This session will unpack how Amazon’s Alexa works, how you think about building voice user interfaces, and which best practices you should consider as you build skills. We will cover this using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js and the ASK CLI.

Have you struggled to get TypeScript and Vue to play well together? Me too. Vue is a fantastic SPA framework, and TypeScript is a great way for catching errors faster. Together, they can boost your productivity. Join us as we peel back the layers of TypeScript and look at the tricks of the trade to get them playing well together. You’ll leave with a solid methodology and code samples to get started with Vue + TypeScript.

Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET and Node, React and Vue. He’s a Microsoft MVP, published author, frequent speaker at conferences, user groups, and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on https://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on Twitter at @rob_rich.

Jinkies! Spoiler Alert! If you’ve seen Scooby-Doo, you know who the monster always is—Old Man Withers, the guy who runs the amusement park. Amusement park operators like Old Man Withers have caused Mystery, Inc. all sorts of problems over the years. Problems that could be avoided with a properly trained recurrent neural network. With RNNs, Scoob and the Gang could have built a model to classify everyone’s speech. This would show them that Old Man Withers and the Redbeard’s Ghost sounded a lot alike!

We can help Mystery, Inc. with this problem by building a recurrent neural network to do just that. You know we got a mystery to solve, and we’re going to solve it by building our model using lines from Scooby-Doo, Keras, and TensorFlow. Once we have our model, we’ll host it on RedisAI so we can quickly build an application to make use of it. Well, we’ve got some work to do now.

I will also explain what neural networks are in general, what recurrent neural networks are in particular, and discuss some practical use of this technology. When we’re done, you’ll know how to build RNNs with Keras, use them to classify text, and integrate them into your application. But more importantly, you’re going to have yourself a Scooby snack! That’s a fact!

Web developers tend to be unabashed defenders of the web platform, and tend to view native mobile platforms as proprietary, gated and bloated.

As a long-time web developer I felt this way too, but then something unexpected happened: I joined the dark side, and spent five years of my career working on—gasp—iOS and Android applications.

Now, like an explorer returning from a multi-year safari—I have so much to share! In this talk I’ll discuss how native development has improved the way I write code for the web, and how you can incorporate the best native app performance and testing tips into your web workflows.

Have you ever asked a tester, “How in the world did you find that bug?” Or maybe you’re being asked to pick up testing activities on your agile cross-functional team—or just wondering what that strange language is the testers are speaking. Agile testing is its own unique skill set, and as quality has become a team responsibility, more and more the agile testing is being performed by non-testers. Increasingly, developers and others are being asked to test and shift left, but they are rarely given the tools to ensure their testing is up to snuff. This often results in wasted time and effort, not to mention costly bugs. Jenna Charlton will explore some of the basics of exploratory testing, testing terminology, and how you can start to think like a tester. Key takeaways include session-based testing with charters, testing vocabulary and techniques, the testing pyramid, understanding and communicating risk, and why automation isn’t always the answer.

Jenna Charlton has been a software tester for nearly a decade. In that time she’s focused on manual testing, taking a particular interest in web accessibility and usability. Jenna’s experience in testing runs the gamut from lone tester on a Scrum team to test lead on an enterprise-level project. Jenna’s primary areas of expertise are in agile testing methodologies, risk based testing, accessibility testing, and test leadership. She is a regular speaker at conferences, covering a variety of testing topics and team collaboration. Jenna is passionate about making testing concepts accessible and relevant.

When working on an enterprise application, the focus should be to make the application fast, which includes a lot of factors like lazy loading, bundle size of the application, and number of API calls. In this talk, we will learn how to optimize your application using the tools available.

Santosh is a GDE for Angular and loves contributing to Angular and NgRx. He works as a software consultant, writes for http://indepth.dev, and mentors for DotNetTricks. He is also the author of the Ngx-Builders package and part of NestJsAddOns core Team. And he runs the Tech Talks with Santosh talk show, where he invites industry experts to discuss different technologies.

Do the letters N - G - R -X make you sad or happy? In this talk we’ll go over best practices you should be using when building enterprise angular applications with NgRx. These few tips will help you better organize and structure your applications and leverage NgRx to do all the heavy lifting in your apps. In the end I plan to turn your frown upside down.

Webpack is an excellent tool for bundling web applications for the browser. The advancements that bundling a web application unlocked propelled frontend applications to where they are today. If you’re building a production application with JavaScript, it’s very likely you’re using Webpack. But what if you could ship your applications without using a bundler? What if you could write applications with better performance and less developer overhead?

In this talk we’ll Explore Snowpack — an exciting tool that lets web developers “Bundle because you want to, not because you need to.” We’ll see how we can write applications using modern, ECMAScript Modules (ESM) natively in the web without a build step. From there, we’ll add more advanced tooling like TypeScript and light bundle step. At the end of this talk, you’ll be a bit more familiar with some of the native browser capabilities for modern JavaScript and some of the performance implications that bundlers can have on our apps.

Today’s fast-moving software delivery environment emphasizes pushing value to production as quickly as possible. “Value to production” implicitly requires high quality—low quality is of little value to anyone! —which means teams need to focus on being able to specify, build, test, and deploy software effectively and quickly. Acceptance testing historically been manually intensive efforts run by a dedicated QA department, resulting in a slower pace of production releases.

No longer do we have to make acceptance a manual effort that requires a dedicated QA department. With the release of Cypress, we have a new standard in front-end testing that allows every developer to create acceptance tests. Come learn how you can create fast, easy, and reliable test for anything that runs in a browser regardless of the front-end framework used.

You will walk away ready to end the era of “Developers don’t write acceptance tests” and start writing acceptance tests for all of your projects.

Justin James

Amplifying Your Voice, Message and Authority.

Justin James is the founder of Let Your Nerd Be Heard where he is hired by Nerdy Entrepreneurs to amplify their voice, message and authority so they are seen as the expert that they are in order to create a legacy, make a massive difference in people’s lives and generate more income. Justin is also the host of the Let Your Nerd Be Heard Show, the creator of the Ultimate Presentation Formula for Nerds, an Award-Winning Entrepreneur, an Amazon #1 International Best Selling Author, an International Public Speaker and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Developer Technologies.

We live in a builder’s paradise, a world of 3d printers and massive batteries. One where amazing products such as Arduino and Raspberry PI provide amazing abilities. Now imagine doing all of this in Javascript! We will use Node to call native C modules that can communicate directly to GPIO pins. We will also look at how libraries such as node-serial can be used to easily communicate with Arduinos and other platforms. All of this will follow the pi-serial-example github project. So join us and learn how to embrace our robotic overlords.

Ever look at modern gaming and think “Gee, I really wish modern games looked like text-based games from the 80’s, but with a modern JavaScript front end”? If so, you have interesting hobbies.

There will be a little bit of something for everyone in this eclectic talk as Matt walks us through the basics of building a text-based game engine using TypeScript and NLP-Compromise.

We’ll walk through the process of prototyping the game world and its interface using event modeling, Balsamiq, and diagramming tools.

You’ll learn how to quickly take a mockup and build it out using Angular and Angular Material.

We’ll take an in-depth look at input parsing using NLP-Compromise to parse user commands and make sense of sentences without having to build a robust database of individual words.

We’ll see how Jest and test-driven-development pair well with Google Analytics to iteratively design and refine the way the game responds to player input.

We’ll close by talking about next steps and how this prototype could be fleshed out to a full JavaScript library and ported to other JavaScript frameworks.

Matt is committed to helping people (and their code) achieve greater things. After nearly two decades of working as a professional software engineer, Matt put away his mechanical keyboard and made teaching others his primary job in a continuing quest to invest in the community and up-and-coming developers. Matt has been working with code since 1987 yet constantly discovers new things to learn. Matt focuses on building quality software applications using C#, F#, TypeScript, Angular, Vue, and plain-old JavaScript. When he’s not teaching or coding, Matt writes on software engineering at KillAllDefects.com, builds highly unusual side projects, goes on refactoring frenzies, and enjoys learning new things to share with the community at large.

Twitter has spoken and a solid hour or BeardCam it is. However, it was a trick! Whenever I’m on camera, it’s BeardCam!

The number two choice was to live-code on RedisMUD. So, that’s what we’ll be doing. I’ll be working with Node and RedisGraph. Tests will be written inusing Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.

The meeting will be streamed on Twitch and there’ll be a Zoom session going as well so y’all can interact with me while I code. Links to the Zoom will be on Meetup when you RSVP. So, please go and do that!

Like the rest of the world, we’re online only right now. As a result, the previously scheduled speaker is not able to make the meetup. I’m planning on filling in. We’ve got a couple choices here:

• I live-code RedisMUD using WebSockets, Node.js, and RedisGraph.
• I give a talk called “Understanding Probabilistic Data Structures with 112,092 UFO Sightings”.
• I brush and oil my beard for an hour.

Alternatively, if someone else would like to speak, I’d be happy to schedule you. Just drop me a line at guy at guy royse dot com (but, you know as an actual email address and not this bot shielding stuff).

Thanks, Guy

Want to create components that work regardless of the front-end framework you are using?

Tired of throwing away your components when you change front-end frameworks?

Wish you could just code it once and reuse it on all of your projects?

Me too! Components are a staple of front-end development as they increase development speed, consistency, and reduce the need for repeat code. To create components often we turn to frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue but we don’t need to.

Using nothing more than HTML and Javascript that is readily available to us in all modern browsers we can create components that work without being tied to any one front-end framework.

You will walk away with the knowledge you need to go forth and create your own components, understand how to make them look gorgeous, and what if any limitations there are. Also, find out how you can bring back the blink tag!

NOTE: This month the meetup will be online only. We’ll be streaming on Twitch. Watch it at https://www.twitch.tv/ColumbusJS at 7:00 PM.

Tools, libraries, and frameworks that rely on modern JavaScript heavily make use of metaprogramming capabilities that is relatively new in the language. Much like Java, JavaScrip has a reflection API, but more important, it has the ability to both inject and synthesize methods and properties dynamically. In this presentation we will learn about the metaprogramming API, the benefits it provides, and how to do both method injection and method synthesis.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, co-founder of the devdotnext software conference, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.

With the recent court decision coming down around Dominos, Accessibility is even more important to keep on top of. But what does it mean to be accessible, and how do we know what we’re doing is actually improving accessibility?

We’ll not be having our regular meeting in December. Instead, we’ll have a holiday party with all the other meetups in town. More details to come including a code so you can attend for free!

MORE DETAILS:

Here’s the link to the event.

For technologists (i.e. a developer who just wants to attend) there is a $9.99 fee, which is already a steal! However, if you enter the promo code cbusjsftw then they’ll waive that fee.

Vue.js, the new kid on the JavaScript framework block is taking the world by storm. Vue has bypassed React in their count of Github stars, alluding to how popular this framework is starting to become. Vue attempts to provide just enough support with libraries like Vuex and the Vue Router, and tooling like the Vue CLI to get developers productive, without aiming to be too opinionated, and too flexible.

If you are curious about Vue, this is the session for you. Come in for a thrilling ride as we explore this fascinating new library and mindset.

Last minute change! This month we’ll have Guy Royse showing everyone the ropes of WebAssembly and he’ll live code a kata of the audience’s choosing (within reason folks) in WebAssembly Text Format.

JavaScript is a language that was written in 10 days, but as it was adopted it evolved through organic community driven growth. This growth and the expansion of JavaScript outside of the browser, saw a need for additional features within the language. One of the most important and controversial of these was the introduction of modules and module loading. Modules increase the ability to abstract JavaScript code, allowing the complexity to be reduced and increases reusability. However, riffs in the community and slow implementation have made modules confusing for most develops. In this presentation we will take a step back and look at the history of modules in JavaScript, the different frameworks that were used to implement them and finally the ECMA Standard adopted by the working group. Once we are done you will be an ECMAScript module master!

Functional programming is a powerful design pattern for software development and is gaining momentum in the JavaScript community. Whether you are completely new to functional programming or have read introductory material on the subject and have begun to use the basics, you will eventually find yourself asking, “What next?” This session will introduce function composition in JavaScript as a design pattern and as a problem solving tool. You will learn two of the most important tools for composition — curry and compose — discovering what they are and how they can be used to write modular functions. By slowly building on a single code example, this session will demonstrate the common thread of composition in functional programming, from piecing together simple functions to utilizing functors for even greater composability. If you want to dive deeper into functional programming, it’s time to embrace function composition!

Cross disciplinary, immersive learning has been a lifelong passion for Jake Witcher. In June of 2018, at age 36, he wrote his first few lines of JavaScript and 10 months later he began his new career as an Associate Software Developer at Callibrity. While new to software, Jake is no stranger to tinkering with new ideas, crafts, or skillsets and has degrees in both Fine Arts and Religion. He is a writer, a speaker, and a functional programming enthusiast. Jake and his wife live in Cincinnati where they homeschool their two children.

Let’s take a look at how JavaScript manages asynchronous events and some of the ways our decisions may work for, or against us.

In this discussion we will examine the ways that JavaScript coordinates and manages events using several coding choices and we can determine which are the good, the bad, and … the ugly.

Bob Fornal is a Senior Developer with Leading EDJE, a husband, father, and programmer. You can follow him on Twitter at @rfornal.

This talk is about the journey of a former incarcerated prisoner who went from Coding in the Clink to his transition on the outside, coding out the clink. What started as a program in 2009 at Marion Correctional Institute as the Agile Factory with a few old Pentium 3 machines peaked the interest of not just men inside, but also volunteers and community members beyond the scope and purpose for which the program was intended. This collaboration between prisoners and IT tech professionals led to our prison conference know as Coding in the Clink. With such programing like this who needs prisons, after part of your rehabilitation brings a skill set that’s very much in demand and could possibly make you a living! However the majority of prisons are still inadequate in programing and resources. And while the Agile Factory provided a valuable skill set that men could take to college or possibly use on the outside, nonetheless with exposure to software craftsmanship prisoners still face barriers to employment. This talk will present personal experience navigating this nontraditional route to a difficult modern industry.

You can and should follow Ahmed on Twitter at @AhmedJalloh614.

Starting a side project is easy, finishing it is hard but promoting it successfully is even harder. In this talk I would like to share what tools and technologies I use to make side projects & successfully promote them. This talk will go into detail on what you need to do to successfully share your work to the whole world instead of just your friends and families.

Software development is a relatively young field. What is considered “beautiful code” one day can be an anti-pattern the next. What if there was a way to write software that is easier to maintain, quicker to write, and more reusable by taking some timeless inspiration from the more established, culinary world?

In this talk we’ll take a look at the cooking term “Mise en place” (dealing with planning and preparation that goes into a meal) and how we can apply this concept to shared component libraries or design systems in our front end applications. We will examine how this strategy can help everyone on the team utilize these same ingredients to build, discuss, and design ultimately better software. While the examples are React-based, the concepts apply to other paradigms as well.

Ryan is a developer based out of Ann Arbor who programs in many languages. He is the author of Griddle and other various open source projects.

Voice technology is exploding. Between Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and others, voice is the next big platform in computing. Voice Metrics is a Columbus-based companies that assists software developers to add voice into their apps – quickly and easily. Learn how to leverage voice in your apps, including code samples and architecture.

Stuart Crane is an 30+ year software entrepreneur, delivering solutions to healthcare and now specializes in voice technologies. Paul Cornwell is a high-end software engineer, specializing in full-stack applications and deep expertise in JavaScript.

It’s a common misconception that Design Systems are for designers. While this is true, they are just as much, if not more for developers. Design Systems are a collaboration tool to increase communication and reduce the time to market for your products. We will talk about what Design Systems are and how you can begin using them today.

Burton Smith has been building software and applications for over 10 years and focuses primarily on web and mobile software engineering. At his current company, he works with internal business stakeholders and external customers to build digital products.

In his free time, he loves spending time with his wife and three daughters, practicing martial arts, jamming on his ukulele, and learning new things (usually about software engineering).

People can reach him on Twitter @stuffbreaker or email directly at burton@breakstuff.io.

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.

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.

We will not be having our regular meeting in December. Instead, we’ll have a holiday party with all the other meetups in town! Learn all about it and RSVP here.

There will be no November meeting this year as it lands on the day before Thanksgiving. So, Happy Thanksgiving and we’ll see you in December at the annual Holiday Party!

This session will begin with a brief introduction to NoSQL. Relational databases have worked on past projects. Why change now? Is NoSQL just a buzzword with no real substance? What can it do that relational can’t? What about all those horror stories and memes?

We’ll look at the best use cases for non-relational databases, how projects have succeeded and failed, and the tools and patterns for using NoSQL and SQL together. If scaling, flexibility, and speed are major concerns on your radar, or if you’re skeptical that the world needs anything but relational, then this session is for you.

This session will look at NoSQL through the lens of the characters from the Halt and Catch Fire TV show: Do you work with a “visionary” like Joe who thinks NoSQL will solve every problem? Are you an engineer like Gordon who doesn’t want to rush into it? Are you like Cameron and just want to smash the big establishment databases? Do you know a Tom who distrusts open-source? Or are you more like Donna and want to find a sensible approach that uses the best of both worlds? Come to this session to find out if you really need NoSQL.

The Processing Foundation is a group of arts educators that came together to make simple but powerful coding tools for making interactive art and 2D games with computers. Over the last few years, their efforts have focused on developing p5.js which is a versatile javascript library that has all the functionality of “Processing”, but in a browser environment.

Educators are starting to use p5.js to teach computer science, and importantly Dan Shiffman’s The Coding Train YouTube channel uses p5.js extensively. The STEMcoding project, led by Prof. Chris Orban at Ohio State, also uses p5.js to show kids how coding relates to science and math by using it to create 2D video games with simple physics. In 2017, the STEMcoding project launched a YouTube channel and created “The Physics of Video Games” activity on Hour of Code.

Prof. Orban will give an overview of the STEMcoding project and talk about possibilities for collaboration, for example, in the development of new coding activities that he would share with his educator network, and “Physics of Video Games” workshops at Columbus libraries.

Want to write a web application? Better get familiar with JavaScript! JavaScript has long been the king of front-end. While there have been various attempts to dethrone it, they have typically involved treating JavaScript as an assembly-language analog that you transpile your code to. This has lead to complex build pipelines that result in JavaScript which the browser has to parse and you still have to debug. But what if there were an actual byte-code language you could compile your non-JavaScript code to instead? That is what WebAssembly is.

I’m going to explain how WebAssembly works and how to use it in this talk. I’ll cover what it is, how it fits into your application, and how to build and use your own WebAssembly modules. And, I’ll demo how to build and use those modules with both Rust and the WebAssembly Text Format. That’s right, I’ll be live coding in an assembly language. I’ll also go over some online resources for other languages and tools that make use of WebAssembly.

When we’re done, you’ll have the footing you need to start building applications featuring WebAssembly. So grab a non-JavaScript language, a modern browser, and let’s and get started!

Guy works for DataRobot in Columbus, Ohio as a Developer Evangelist. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software.

A JavaScript promise is a handy container for a value you expect to get later. But a promise is also a value itself, and you can do some useful stuff just knowing you have a promise.

Neal Lindsay works for Test Double, where he gets to help companies write software better. He likes Javascript unironically.

Writing clean, readable, front-end applications is often a challenge, and there are tons of frameworks and libraries that seek to solve this problem. One of the fastest growing solutions out there today is React. Developed by Facebook, React (and its companion library, Redux) is a highly scalable and elegant solution to many of javascript’s UI challenges. This talk will focus on the basics of how to get started in React, as well as some of the ideas behind writing clean and scalable React applications, and how to implement those ideas in large UI projects. It will also cover Redux, a state management library also developed by Facebook and built to work well with React applications.

Yasi Minachi is a software developer at Pillar Technology, and has been writing code professionally for six years in an eclectic mix of different languages, frameworks, and projects, both front and back-end. In her spare time, she likes playing board games, indoor rock climbing, and exploring new things to do in Columbus.

Have an old phone or tablet? Don’t sell it, run a robot. While the phone platform is much more restrictive than Raspberry Pi, but it’s also much simpler. Additionally it provides a great screen, a touch interface, sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes and a compass, a high resolution camera, a microphone, a speaker, Bluetooth and WiFi.

This talk will give an overview of React Native, and how to use React Native to control a robot and give it all the previously mentioned capabilities. Want to do more advanced things with your robot like adding cloud based AI, this talk will talk about that as well. As always Scott will bring a robot or two and demo the code live during the talk.

Scott Preston is an engineer, developer and entrepreneur from Columbus, Ohio. Scott enjoys making things that run on JavaScript. Whether it’s a robot, a smart home, or an Iron Man suit, Scott always has a story to tell. He’s been speaking about robotics, artificial intelligence or JavaScript since 2005 at local user groups or national conferences, including a local favorite, CodeMash.

Scott’s currently working as an independent consultant focusing on JavaScript Technologies and Cloud.

You can reach him on twitter @scottpreston.

From the Vue.js site:

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

Burton is a software engineer at Bunzl North America and has been building software and applications for over 10 years. He builds line-of-business applications and works closely with their marketing teams on external-facing websites in their CMS.

In his free time, he loves spending time with his wife and three daughters, practicing my martial arts, and learning new things (usually about programming).

People can reach him on Twitter @stuffbreaker or email directly at burton@breakstuff.io.

WARNING: This is not another “React 101 - How to write Hello World in React” talk. By now, many of us have watched all the training videos and done all the tutorials, but what does it actually look like to bring a React application all the way to production? In this talk, we will explore what it takes to build a full-scale React application, from how to utilize the framework as a team, to setting up an end-to-end software pipeline.

Brandon Rockwell is a Columbus-based software consultant with 5+ years of experience working with many different technologies, and is always looking for new ways to bring JavaScript into the hearts and minds of our community.

Bigfoot has been a staple of American folklore since the 19th century. The stories originate from Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and likely go back centuries or more. The term sasquatch itself is an Anglicized derivative of the Halkomelem word sásq’ets.

Many people are convinced that Bigfoot is real. Others suggest that he is a cultural phenomenon. Some just want to believe. There is even a group, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, that tracks Bigfoot sightings. They have data— thousands of reports—available on the Internet. And, where there is data, we can apply the power of machine learning.

Let’s get to the bottom of this mystery! To do it, we are going to use the Nexosis Machine Learning API. With the API, we’ll forecast the predicted number of sightings for the coming months and years. We’ll measure the impact of key cultural phenomena—primarily the airing of the X-Files—on Bigfoot sightings. And, we’ll see if we can classify some bigfoot sightings of our own using natural language processing.

So, come and learn how to use the API, the types of problems you can solve with it, and how to use it from your favorite programming language.

The truth is out there.

Guy Royse is a Developer Evangelist with Nexosis where he combines his decades of experience in building software with a passion for sharing what he has learned with others.

The Chrome Developer Tools are absolutely packed with features. Some are incredibly useful. Some are just plain surprising. For example: Turn the browser into an editor, fuzzy search source filenames, display data in the console in tabular format and much, much more. In this session, we will fix up the storefront for Wacky Wanda’s Wicked Weapons and learn some console wizardry in the process. In the course of our tribulations we will correct styling problems, enhance our debugging skills, and clean up server-side snafus.

Greg Malcolm is an Application Developer/Consultant working for ICC. He is a polyglot developer who loves experimenting with new languages and frameworks. In recent years he’s been focussing more and more on Javascript related frameworks. If you’re wondering about the accent, everyone speaks like this in the southern foothills of Columbus.

This year we’ll be joining the larger party and participating in the Columbus Tech Community Holiday Celebration 2017. Admission is free. There will be food and drinks. Find out all the details at their site. Space is limited, so while you’re there, make sue you register for the event.

Have you ever wanted to get started with an Angular application? Have you struggled with where to go next after you cloned one of the many seed projects? Look no further! This talk will cover the official Angular CLI which will create a production-ready single page application with just a few commands. From generating a skeleton project to deploying to production, the CLI is with you every step of the way. Come see why the CLI is becoming the tool to use to build your Angular projects.

Stephen Cavaliere is a Senior Software Engineer at Pillar Technology. He is also a consultant, speaker, and mentor. Hacking since 2004 and working professionally since 2010, Stephen loves to find ways to make things better with code.

Currently, he has a passion for all things Angular. You can see that in his contributions to the Angular CLI, where he is consistently working to improve the user experience. While not behind a computer, Stephen can be found spending time at dog parks with his dog, Zeke.

React and Angular 2 are getting a lot of buzz these days, but how do you decide which one to use? I took a small Rails app that I have in production and rewrote it using both Angular 2 and React. I’ll show you the code for the different versions, which will cover project setup, routing, validation, view syntax, JSX, handling query string parameters, managing state, Redux, Redux reducers, hot reloading, and testing. I’ll go over some pros and cons and things I like/don’t like that might help you decide which way to go.

Not just for offline, Service Workers allow your web app to give a snappy response and predictable behavior, so your web app “feels like an app” to your more-satisfied users.

Doug Reeder works at Chase as a software engineer.

For years front-end developers have bemoaned having to use the DOM; it’s slow, inconsistent, and difficult to use. While libraries of the past provided better ways to interface with the DOM, recent libraries like React and Vue have instead implemented an entirely new DOM: the virtual DOM. Implementations of the virtual DOM allow developers to create and maintain UI components using entirely declarative interfaces that completely abstract away the real DOM. In this session, attendees will unlock the power of the virtual DOM through a step-by-step tutorial on the creation of a virtual DOM implementation in roughly 100 lines of code. In doing so, they will gain a precise understanding of the advantages the virtual DOM provides to speed, maintainability, and testability.

Tools for modern JavaScript development are evolving very quickly in order to help developers deliver the types of experiences our users have come to expect. In 2017 and beyond, we have plenty of frameworks to choose from to build our next app. So how do you know which JavaScript framework to choose? What if you don’t have to? What happens if we use libraries and design patterns to build our applications instead of full blown frameworks? Let’s explore a way to build a JavaScript application by using event sourcing and pub/sub with stateless view components.

It seems like every day a new JavaScript framework is created. It can be overwhelming to keep up with all of them. This session will discuss some JavaScript packages that will make analyzing and displaying data a snap. We will discuss D3.js, CrossFilter.js, DC.js and jQuery DataTables. These are very robust community supported libraries. Use them in your client application to add interactive visualizations and data analysis tools.

Doug is a Principal Consultant at Improving Enterprises in Columbus Ohio. He started developing software as a high school freshman on a TRS-80 16K. Since then he developed software for Graphics Kiosks, Rules Engines, Specialized Hardware and ASP.Net websites. Over the last few years, he has helped grow the Windows Developer Community in Central Ohio and he spends his free time developing Windows applications and Unity games.

“Flow Programming”, building Web Apps with NodeRed, and the NodeJS, HTML, and JavaScript Internals of NodeRed.

This week we’ll be hosting the Mozilla Developer Roadshow at The Forge. Space is limited so please let us know if you are coming.

Featured Expert

Potch is a Web Developer Advocate at Mozilla. He’s also the creator of unmaintained.tech, which encourages people to open source their software even when they don’t have time to support it. When he’s not building dashboards or making stickers, he’s probably singing karaoke. Or singing in the car. Or shower.

Overview

In the early years of the web, there were limits on where you could put content on a web page. Now, with CSS properties powering dynamic layouts in browsers, a renaissance in layout design patterns is emerging. In this interactive workshop, Potch shows us how we can leverage CSS and related tools to craft innovative designs for the web.

What You’ll Take Away

• Get a firm grasp on new CSS tools to build webpages as close to your vision as possible.
• Discover how the new CSS Grid Layout property will revolutionize your webpage layouts and simplify your existing ones for a seamless user experience.

Why It Matters

With new tools available to simplify your design process, you’ll be able to build your ideal webpage layout without compromising the user experience.

Want to know more about dev stuff? Sign up for our Developer Newsletter. Find out more about Mozilla and the Roadshow here.

Jasmine is a behavior-driven testing framework for JavaScript that doesn’t require a DOM and isn’t dependent on other JavaScript frameworks. In this talk, attendees will learn how to write tests using the Jasmine framework.

Due to a last minute cancellation, there will be no meeting this month.

Guy Royse will be live coding a simple AWS Lambda service.

End the year hacking and celebrating. We’ll hang out, have a party, and maybe even write some code.

Nathan Wallace will be speaking on functional programming. Come and check it out!

Check out Riot.js, a microlibrary for building SPAs.

Google Apps Script (GAS) is a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services and build web applications. This talk is intended as an introduction to GAS and will cover a few example integrations.

Your Sets, Dictionaries and Graphs have a problem. It is difficult to merge changes made in your domain – especially if they happen simultaneously with shared data across nodes. This compounds once you consider disconnected apps and partitioned networks in or between data centers. Convergent Replicated Data Types solve these problems by allowing updates to arrive out of order, or even replayed without risk of corruption. You will be introduced to these data structures and given a tour of the tradeoffs and advantages of using them. While the technology is fairly new, libraries are cropping up across platforms. You’ll be ready to assess them and make decisions about what they might do for your domain.

In this session will talk about what is different about this generation of web applications and how a solid development approach must consider the latency, throughput and interactivity demand by users across both mobile devices, web browsers, and IoT. We will demonstrate how to include Couchbase in such applications to support a flexible data model and easy scalability required for modern development.

We will demonstrate how to create a full stack application focusing on the CEAN stack which is composed of Couchbase, Express Framework, AngularJS, and Node.js.

Scott will be presenting Hello World in an assortment of frameworks.

Come and learn about node-inspector.

Long ago, in the late days of the first Internet boom, before jQuery, before Underscore, before Angular, there was a web application built by a large corporation. This application was written as a server-side application using server-side technology like Java or PHP. A tiny seed of JavaScript was added to some of the pages of this application to give it a little sizzle.

Over the ages, this tiny bit of JavaScript grew like kudzu. Most of it was embedded in the HTML in SCRIPT tags. Some of it was dynamically generated by the server-side code. Browser specific hacks were added. An AJAX call was added. jQuery was added. Helper functions were added. Lots of helper functions. So many helper functions.

In time pyramids of doom built from anonymous callbacks and hundreds, nay, thousands of interdependent global functions ruled the day. And the programmers did despair. They cried to put the code under test that it might be refactored. “Add unit tests”, they exhorted. But, lo, there were no units to test, only anonymous functions.

Does this sound like your current application? I know I’ve worked on a lot of codebases just like this one. I’ve come up with some techniques to refactor them and put them under test (so the real refactoring can begin). In this session I will share them with you.

Josef will be talking about SauceLab and end-to-end automated testing.

Are you overwhelmed by JavaScript framework fatigue? Do you wish for the benefits of the newest front-end advancements without continually rewriting your application? Let’s take a look at the latest version of Ember. We’ll review the tooling, debugging, and addons that have made Ember a growing choice for innovative companies like Heroku, Travis CI, Square, and Nest. See how Ember adopts the best from other frameworks while bringing us the future of JavaScript today. You’ll leave this session with a clear understanding of how Ember fits into your front-end toolbox and why it might be the ideal choice for your next project.

More and more JavaScript libraries and client-side frameworks use promises to manage asynchronous data. But now you’re just using a .then() method to pass the same handler functions you did before. What is so great about that? Promises are not just a different place to specify callbacks. Learn about the significance of return values to promises, how promises can be composed, and helper methods provided by popular promise libraries for that purpose. You will also see common promise anti-patterns and how bringing callback-oriented thinking to promises can cause you to miss out on opportunities to simplify your code.

End the year hacking and celebrating. We’ll hang out, have a party, and maybe even write some code.

Hack! Share! Learn! We’ll be joining forces with the Arduino & Raspberry Pi Enthusiasts group to have another Hack Night.

Scott Preston will be bringing impressive things as he is wont to do. Guy Royse will be prepared to build ridiculous stuff with an Arduino, nodejs, and Johnny-Five.

You should bring something too!

Justin Searls will be speaking about his newest library – testdouble.js.

Don Abney will speak about and hack on the Intel Edison.

Lauren Kinsey will speak on diversity in technology.

Guy Royse will live code his way through another talk. This time talking about what promises are and how to use them. And, how to test them using Mocha and Chai.

Anyone who has written JavaScript knows how easy it is for the code to become a big ugly unmaintainable mess. Let’s stop dumping code into one big file, mixing responsibilities, and putting everything in global scope! JavaScript modules can help us keep our code clean, maintainable and testable. RequireJS and Browserify are the two most popular JavaScript module loading frameworks. They serve a similar purpose, but have drastically different implementations. In this talk we will introduce JavaScript modules, and compare the features and drawbacks of RequireJS and Browserify. Which one is right for your next project?

In June, we’ll have another Meteor hack night. Meteor is a complete open source platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript. We’ll be hacking and coding. Bring your machine, your ideas, and your brain.

Jason Karns will talk about why we don’t really need all these build tools and should instead give npm scripts a try.

Check out these articles: Why we should stop using Grunt & Gulp and How to Use npm as a Build Tool, both by Keith Cirkel.

ECMAScript most famous dialect is JavaScript, and the coming version is ECMAScript 6 (ES6). Browsers already started supporting some of its features. JS programmers need to start learning about the coming changes. The presentation will show some of ES6 most useful features like classes, block scope, collections, proxies, arrow functions, iterators, generators, comprehensions, and modules. We will concentrate on the practical aspects of the changes. The session will be interactive, includes many code examples, and will encourage audience participation. By the end of the presentation, participants will know when and how to use ES6 in their own projects.

Guy Royse will guide the group in test driven development with Testem and Jasmine.

Ben Gladwell will give a talk on Gulp.js. Gulp is a popular task runner/build tool. It’s powered by NodeJS and uses pipes for streaming data. There are a vast array of Gulp plugins available for tasks such as minifying code, uglifying javascript, watching files, and live-reloading the browser when files have changed.

From www.polymer-project.org:

“Web Components usher in a new era of web development based on encapsulated and interoperable custom elements that extend HTML itself. Built atop these new standards, Polymer makes it easier and faster to create anything from a button to a complete application across desktop, mobile, and beyond.”

Polymer learning events and resources: itshackademic.com

Other good resources: webcomponents.org, component.kitchen

We’ll be joining together for the holidays with an extended Code Kata session. Guy will be leading the group in coding the Evercraft Kata.

Node-Webkit is an app runtime based on Chromium and Node.js. You can write native apps in HTML and JavaScript with Node-Webkit. It also lets you call Node.js modules directly from the DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all web technologies.

The presentation is available on github: github.com/scottpreston/presentations/tree/master/node-webkit.

github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Bluemix is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering from IBM with roots deeply grounded in an open source project called Cloud Foundry. Javascript is a first class citizen when it comes to applications running on Bluemix.

The combination of Javascript and Bluemix allows developers to quickly build and deploy all types of applications to the public cloud in a matter of seconds. This talk will actually be composed of several smaller talks that show just how powerful Bluemixcan be.

We will start off with an introduction to Bluemix and show you the basics of using the platform. We will then walk you through how you would build and deploy a typical Node.js web application toBluemix. Finally, we will cover more advanced topics like the internet of things (IoT) and cognitive computing using Bluemix.

If you are at all interested in using a PaaS in your next project or want to learn about how a PaaS can change the way you build Javascript apps, we hope you will come and join us for a jam-packed evening that is sure to impress.

On Wednesday, September 17th, we are having a JavaScript Hardware Night. Bring your JavaScript powered hardware projects and share them with the group (if you like). Bring stuff to hack on and bring your ideas.

• Scott Preston will be bringing his robots.
• Doug Reeder is planning something with the Connect SDK.
• Guy Royse will share his work with Johnny Five, the Arduino, and Raspberry Pi.
• Keith McCanless might even have a JS Hardware talk prepared (hint, hint) around the Beaglebone.

The format will be loose. People who want to share their ideas will be given a screen to do it on. If you just want to hack, then pair up with some buddies and have at it.

Grunt is king. It is the ubiquitous task runner used for most nodejs projects and has quickly expanded to conquer other software ecosystems. However, its kingdom is vulnerable. Grunt does not align well with many nodejs paradigms and is notorious for its harsh learning curve. Meet Gulp, the challenger in the taskrunner revolution. Gulp’s easy configuration produces an easy learning curve, and its alignment with nodejs paradigms eliminates the friction. Grab your ticket, your foam finger, and your team-colored face paint and witness the battle, the revolution, and the crowning of Gulp.

The deck is already online, too at speakerdeck.com.

The key to quickly learning JavaScript MV* Frameworks is to break them down into a series of features. The main features of an MV* application are routing, data binding, templates/views, models, and data storage. In this talk, I’ll describe these main features and show code examples from two or three frameworks for each feature. You will begin to concretely understand what these frameworks are trying to help you accomplish and realize they are more alike than they are different. In fact, it becomes apparent that most of the frameworks borrow heavily from the successes of the others.

About the Speaker:

Craig McKeachie is the author of the JavaScript Framework Guide and the host of the podcast frontendcast.com. His blog is at funnyant.com where he writes with a JavaScript and front-end development focus.

Topics are:

Jan Milosh: Prerender.io

Prerender slides can be found at janmilosh.github.io/prerender-talk.

Craig McKeachie: How to Learn JavaScript Frameworks Quickly - AngularJS, Backbone, Ember

Many copies of Craig’s new book JavaScript Framework Guide - AngularJS, Backbone, Ember: Confidently Choosing and Quickly Learning will be given away at the talk so be sure to attend this one.

Kurt Mueller presents an introduction to React.js, a JavaScript library from the people at Facebook. Greg Malcolm will lead a JavaScript Koans coding exercise.

Neal Lindsay presents an introduction to D3.js, a JavaScript library for interactive data visualization.

Jared Faris with be presenting “JavaScript for Fun and Sockets: Using Socket.IO or SignalR to Harness the Power of WebSockets”. The title might be long, but the talk will be good.

In March, Meteor is taking over the JavaScript Usergroup! We’re gonna be hacking and coding. Bring your machine, your ideas, and your brain.