Javascript has always been a language with very little syntactic sugar—for better or worse. With ES6/2015, and future iterations,though, Javascript is gaining a more and more abstract and expressive syntax. To some it might appear that our language—which already seems accessible and approachable for beginners—is becoming even more accessible and approachable. However, both the humanities and CS education research have proven that abstraction, while a powerful tool for knowledgeable practitioners, can be an equally powerful foil for beginners.

As we enter the era of language-level abstractions in ES6/2015, we are charged with the task of rethinking how we teach JavaScript. Through an interdisciplinary montage I will identify the problem of teaching abstraction as a ubiquitous demand across nearly every domain, and align the issues of creativity and critical thinking in the humanities with issues in computer science.

The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the discipline of computer science and that of the humanities can inform each other to produce more effective and creative solutions to both developing and teaching abstractions.

We keep up to date with the latest developments in technologies and tools. We make sure to post pull requests to fix bugs we found in projects. We offer helpful advice in forums to people with coding questions. We propose talks for meetups and conferences to provide insight and inspiration.

All this on top of our day job.

When in the midst of all this activity do we stop to think about our mental or physical health?

The mental stress of sustained periods of high intellectual activity is draining and exhausting. The Physical impact of having such a sedentary job is becoming increasingly recognised. And all those caffeinated and sugar filled drinks we consume to keep going? Yeah, they’re not that good for us either.

In this presentation I will look at quick tips to keep ourselves a little healthier whilst we do what we love. I’m not talking gruelling evenings huffing and puffing at the gym, but manageable and easy advice to whip you into shape.

Computers and brains are often used as metaphors for one another, but how exactly does JavaScript stack up against the human mind? This talk will take three facets of human cognition: attention, knowledge representation, and language processing, and compare them to analogues in JavaScript: the event loop, the object and prototype system, and the parser.

Today’s development environment is heavily focussed on “mobile first”, but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology’s first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness, and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions.

This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country’s changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan’s early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field?

Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we’ll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan.

Music is often thought of as a purely auditory experience. But scientific research (and any fan of concerts!) has shown that our senses are interconnected: they intermingle to create a full-bodied moment.

To explore the intersection between our senses, we created a new musical experience: the performer at her (tiny and portable) piano extends her gestures to the audience, triggering (via a Kinect) sounds and tones through the speakers of their mobile phones. The audience also becomes an involved performer, by augmenting and distorting the sounds with their own movements.

During this talk, we’ll break through the fourth wall of performance and demonstrate how this musical experience was technically accomplished via JS / Web Audio / your ears, as well as invoke the piece itself in a meta experience with the audience (as long as the wifi cooperates!).

One of the things that make video games awesome is that you can use anything to make a game. One of the things that make being a web developer awesome is that you have a lot of amazing APIs at your disposal.

Why not combine both for maximum effect? Like using the Web Audio API to make your own music driven game using a real life ukulele as controller? I’d like to show you how, why and on top you’ll learn some music theory.

From a textile loom, to a teletype terminal, to a desktop computer, to the web; the stitches in your garment and the letters on your screen are both the result of operations executed on data.

When I first learned to code websites, I took it for granted that <img src="image.jpeg"> displayed an image because it is a “digital photo.” When I learned Node.js, saying “use Buffer” and “create a Stream” became routine. But I never really understood what a “chunk of data” looked like.

Then I started a craft project to convert digital graphics into knit patterns for an electric knitting machine. Little did I know, I was researching the origins of computing, data storage and digital communication: textile looms operated by punch cards. By knitting fabric, I learned to give instructions to a machine with just 2 signals. I discovered what a ‘bit’ really is, in my scarf! This physical, tactile experience with binary made everything in my JavaScript work much clearer.

I’d like to share my discovery process, and through some hacks and textiles give a friendly explanation about the “world of bits”.

Making the web accessible to people with all abilities is a key social justice issue of our era. Unfortunately, there’s still a lack of commonly adopted best practices. For developers, it can feel like a daunting challenge to sort through all the relevant technical documentation and work out how to apply it.

This talk aims to address this problem by presenting some practical and easy to apply code samples that can significantly improve the web experience for people with a range of disabilities. It will also demonstrate how common Javascript libraries can be built upon to allow assistive technologies to access features of rich web applications such as maps, filtering and carousels.

As well as looking at the code, there will be a short introduction to the legislative framework, technical specifications, project management and testing approaches for developing accessible websites.

Empathy can be a pivotal factor in the success of yourself and your projects. If you don’t care about the people using your product, why are you making it? If you don’t care about your co-workers who will have to use your code, why do you work with them? If you don’t care about yourself, why are you doing this as a career?

Some people may ask “why empathy?”. Let’s examine this concept, find ways to be more empathetic in our actions, and discuss the pragmatism of empathy.

This talk will explore various ways in which developers can be more empathetic to the community, their co-workers, and themselves. The talk will also explore larger ways we as an industry can work together to improve empathy.

Open-science is about making scientific research accessible to everyone, from other scientists to the general public, but often that means just dumping data sets and publishing the researchers’ interpretations. To truly communicate findings and ignite collaboration, we need to expose the tools that the scientists used to analyse the data, simulate the mathematical models, and visualise the results.

As a neuroscientist and a web developer, this is something I’ve been working towards. My talk will show how the old-school, computationally-heavy software used in science can be set free using the centralized power of cloud resources and the ubiquity of the browser. We’ll see real-time, publicly-broadcast, simulations of the electrical activity in brain cells, visualised in 3D using JavaScript.

Powerful computation, cheaper electronics, increased connectivity and the steadily lowering of barriers to entry to prototyping and production are propelling a new hardware revolution. And you can be part of it. JavaScript might just be your ticket to this amazing ride.

In my talk I’ll walk you through the rapidly evolving technological stack that allows regular web developers like us to do amazing stuff. Stuff that was the sole realm of electronic engineers and embedded developers just 10 years ago.

To put all this into context, I’ll bring Felix along to Berlin. Felix is my small quadruped pet robot who wants to be (Boston Dynamics’) BigDog when he grows up.

Transcending the virtual world is a powerful experience. Turning on an LED with software you just wrote feels like a Promethean endeavour.

After this talk you will have no excuses not to get your hands dirty and start playing with hardware.