Washington, DC USA
JSCONF 2009
April 24 & 25, 2009
Speakers
JSConf 2009 is bringing together 14 16 of the top minds in JavaScript to provide the most exciting presentations and discussions to you. The speakers are presenting their amazing work using JavaScript at every level of the programming stack. Speakers are presented below alphabetically with their topic and a quick biography provided about them. If you want to present at JSConf 2009 on a topic, product, or idea that you have, there will be a Track B for lightning talks and hackfests. Speaking inTrack B is completely free form, so register now and start preparing your topic to present. Through both Track A and Track B, the conference will blend the best parts of a normal lecture style conference and a "*-camp" style conference.
At this point all speaker slots for Track A are filled.
Chris Anderson
Topic: Apache CouchDB can serve applications written using familiar Ajax patterns, using no middle-tier application server. Standalone CouchApps are quick and easy to develop, as well as being easily portable. They are ideal for in-house or education projects, as well as opening up novel opportunities using CouchDB's peer-based replication. In this talk I'll walk you through hello world with CouchApps, and then explain some of the new possibilities they open up.
About: Chris is an active CouchDB committer and co-author of CouchDB: The Definitive Guide. He consults on high-availability CouchDB installations. He and his wife Amy live in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Chris is a music aficionado and shares his thoughts on just about anything on his blog at http://jchris.mfdz.com.
Kryssy Bloch
Topic: Looking for a job, hate your current job, just have no idea what you want to do next? Bring these questions and others for a informative Q&A about finding the perfect role for yourself! Wondering what not to say or not to do, urban interview legends exposed.
About: Kryssy is program manager, technology, at R/GA, a digital advertising, communications, and design agency based in New York. In her current role, Kryssy oversees recruitment and project staffing for more than 130 developers, software engineers, and QA testers, as well as the company's summer internship program. Prior to joining R/GA five years ago, Kryssy held the title of producer, DVD and new formats, at Sony. In her spare time, she enjoys experimenting with Android applications and other new technologies, and drinking. She's also a girl, which makes her something of a rarity around here.
Nick Campbell
Topic: Mastering server side technology should not be limited to DBAs and backend specialists. Every web developer already has the knowledge needed to make powerful applications. Axiom Stack, an open source web framework, provides the flexibility of Javascript alongside the power of the JVM's libraries and ecosystem. This talk will be about the design and architecture of Axiom Stack: what makes it tick and how it can help you.
About: Nick is the Director of Product Development at Axiom Software, Inc. Making a start at a web services company, Nick has seen both sides of the services vs products divide. He brings that experience and more to shepherding along development at Axiom Software. When not at work, his time is spent balancing side projects with life outside of Emacs. You can find his blog at http://digitaltumbleweed.com.
James Duncan
Topic: JavaScript Platform as a Service - Economics, Capabilities & a Little Philosophy - The era of the Platform-as-a-Service is coming. With the development cycle of new applications shrinking, and the scope of those applications becoming more focussed, the ability to deploy, and scale new applications is becoming a critical to any businesses success. Joyent's Smart Platform is an open source Platform-as-a-Service, letting developers to build scalable, complex web applications in JavaScript that runs on the server, and then deploy those applications into the "cloud" using Git. While many cloud-services are focussing on the primitives - machines and storage - long term organizations embracing the cloud will want to move up the stack, where they no longer need to worry about operating systems, backups, or security patches. The talk will outline some of the economic imperatives for the rise of a the Platform-as-a-Service, discuss the need for not only open standards, but open source, and demonstrate some of the Smart Platform's capabilities.
About: James Duncan - Director, Platform Strategy at Joyent, Inc. James is a grizzled veteran of many startups - some successful, some not. Having seen the successful acquired, and IPO'd James brings perspective of how companies change, from small to large, and what a company needs to do at each stage of its growth. Most recently, James was one of two founders at Reasonably Smart, a Platform-as-a-Service company based in Montreal. Joyent's acquisition of Reasonably Smart's subsequent in January 2009 had James become our Director, Platform Strategy. Prior to Reasonably Smart, James spent 7 years at Fotango, finishing his time there as the CIO. Fotango, acquired by Canon in 2001, developed one of the world's first Platform-as-a-Service offerings. This expertise allows James to bring a deep knowledge of platforms, frameworks, and operations to Joyent and their customers.
Jeff Haynie
Topic: Deploying web applications on the desktop - In this topic, Jeff will discuss how to build and deploy desktop rich applications using Titanium which run seamlessly on Windows, OSX and Linux desktops using Javascript and HTML.
About: Jeff Haynie is currently the co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, an open source company located in Mountain View, California focused on making it easier to build and deploy rich applications. Jeff has over two decades years of software development experience and currently enjoys building desktop applications in HTML and Javascript.
Peter Higgins
Topic: Dojo: Patterns for Lovers of JavaScript -- Dojo teaches fundamentally sounds techniques for high performance JavaScript applications across the board. In this session, you will learn how these techniques are used internally provide a stable, professional-grade foundation for creating highly maintainable, scalable projects of any size. Learn about the powerful dojo.data and RPC APIs, and other internal favorites of Dojo Ninjas. From the smallest use cases covered by Base Dojo to fully featured Rich Applications, the Dojo Toolkit provides quality tools for every step of the way.
About: Peter Higgins (aka 'dante') is the Project Lead of the Dojo Toolkit and Lead Support Engineer at SitePen, a prominent web development and consulting company based in Silicon Valley offering unparalleled services and support for all things Web. Peter maintains several Dojo-based Open Source projects in addition to the Toolkit itself, and is continually working with various JavaScript communities to bring unity and stability the the DHTML/Ajax landscape.
Jason Huggins
Topic: Bending JavaScript to your will, or why testing JavaScript in the browser can drive you crazy: This talk will cover the previously untold story of Selenium's JavaScript internals. You'll learn how Selenium had to trick the browser's single-threaded JavaScript engine into a continuation machine to wait for things like page loads or returned Ajax messages. You'll also learn how Selenium could have used Brendan Eich's Narcissus meta-circular JavaScript interpreter to clean up the mess, and why Narcissus is just really run to play with. (Hint: You can use Narcissus as a code pre-processor to tweak JavaScript into your own little language. Want optional parens on function calls? Done!)
About: Jason Huggins is the co-founder of Sauce Labs, where the focus is on cloud-based web application testing. He currently works and lives just west of Chicago -- the best city in the world. Jason is the creator of the Selenium web automation framework. Besides enjoying programming with Python, JavaScript, and ABJ (Anything But Java), he likes to hack on Arduino-based projects, like Ambient Orb clones.
Brian LeRoux
Topic: PhoneGap makes building iPhone and Android applications a snap with regular HTML, CSS and JavaScript. XUI is a nifty javascript microframework designed for building mobile web applications. Avoid the heresy of Objective-C or Java and return to the sanity of the open web. In this talk Brian will guide you through the creation of a mobile web app that is app store ready and talk a little about the future platforms for PhoneGap and XUI.
About: Co-creator of XUI and contributor to PhoneGap. Brian believes that the future of the internet is mobile and will rely on web standards, open source and hackers like you. Brian works at Nitobi Software: a leader in user experience and all things javascript.
Jack Moffitt
Topic: A new real time Web is emerging, backed by the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This protocol is designed for low latency, real time communication, publish-subscribe, and social networking. You will learn how XMPP and HTTP can be combined to make new applications possible and how to harness XMPP from JavaScript. We will use the Strophe library to create a few simple XMPP applications.
About: Jack Moffitt is a hacker and entrepreneur. He is currently creating real time search applications based on XMPP and Web technologies using JavaScript, Erlang, and Python. Previously he created Chesspark, an online game community build on top of XMPP, led the team behind the Ogg, Vorbis, and Theora patent-free multimedia codec projects, and created the Icecast sreaming media server. Jack is passionate about Free and Open Source software, technology in general, and music.
John Resig
Topic: It's a surprise.
About: John Resig is a JavaScript developer and the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library. He currently works for the Mozilla Corporation where he works as a JavaScript Evangelist. He's also the creator of a number of other popular JavaScript projects including Processing.js and Env.js. He's the author of the book 'Pro JavaScript Techniques' and the upcoming 'Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja'.
Ian Smith
Topic: Better Data Management with TaffyDB: In this presentation you will learn about the TaffyDB Library. TaffyDB acts as a thin data layer within your JavaScript applications that makes it easy to manage, manipulate, and query your data without returning to the server. In this presentation you will get an overview of how TaffyDB works and how easy it is to start using it in your applications. You will also learn how putting TaffyDB at the core of your application can help you create faster, more flexible, and more innovative experiences for your users.
About: Ian Smith is a self taught web developer who has been working in the industry since the late 1990s. His claims to fame include the Joe's Goals online habit tracker, a stint as a contributor to the popular Download Squad blog, being the primary editor of the MostRecent.Net JavaScript page, and the opensource TaffyDB JavaScript Database library. He currently works as the Development Team Manager for QuoteWizard in Seattle, WA. On his own time he enjoys reading, shooting, writing, and the company of his beautiful wife Heather and brand new baby Sasha.
Stoyan Stefanov
Topic: So your new web app is ready to kick ass, only... it's oh-so-slow. You have two options - microoptimize or focus on the things that really matter. Come and learn how to make your web apps fly by following proven, simple and straightforward practices for high-performance JavaScript. The talk also includes an intro to the all-new YSlow 2.0 performance tool and the next generation of the YUI library - YUI 3.x.
About: Stoyan Stefanov is a Yahoo! front-end developer, focusing on web application performance. Architect of the performance extension YSlow 2.0 and creator of smush.it image optimization tool. Speaker, book author ("Object-Oriented JavaScript") and blogger at phpied.com and yuiblog.com.
Mike Subelsky
Topic: Introduction to SproutCore: This exciting new JavaScript framework allows developers to build fluid and feature-rich desktop clients that run inside the web-browser, such as Apple's MobileMe suite. It uses the full power of JavaScript but takes its inspiration from the Cocoa framework, specifically the use of Key-Value Observation. The talk will include short videos and live coding and will not be your typical "talk to my slides" presentation.
About: Mike Subelsky is the co-founder of the web startup OtherInbox.com, and the co-organizer of Ignite Baltimore. His SproutCore client for OtherInbox was launched in September at Techcrunch50. Prior to becoming a full-time Rails and SproutCore hacker, he served as a U.S. Navy information warfare officer with assignments around the world for seven years. He blogs about open-source technologies at subelsky.com.
Francisco Tolmasky
Topic: This session will provide a high level overview of the Objective-J language and Cappuccino frameworks. We'll spend a short period of time discussing both these technologies and the reasoning behind them. Then we'll dive right into showing you how to use them to create beautiful and immersive user interfaces for your web applications that parallel those found on the desktop. We'll cover how to add features such as drag and drop, copy/paste, undo/redo, and autosave.
About: Francisco is a co-founder of 280 North and the creator of the Objective-J programming language. Before this, Francisco was an early member of the iPhone team at Apple, working on Mobile Safari and Maps as well as designing the Web SDK. At 280 North he is helping to bring desktop-class applications to the browser with their new open source framework, Cappuccino. They recently launched 280 Slides, a web presentation tool and the first application built on Cappuccino.
Andrew Turner
Topic: The integration of JavaScript to control a virtual reality and vehicle simulation software modeling software package called SimCreator. The talk will discuss the ability to script real-world events and behaviors such as traffic patterns, pedestrians, urban situations, warfare simulations, and vehicle testing.
About: Andrew Turner is the CTO of FortiusOne and co-founder of Mapufacture - focusing on building easy to use web-based geospatial visualization and collaboration tools. He originally worked on satellites and airships and now applies this technology to open-source tools and community projects such as OpenStreetMap that are being used by the United Nations and other NGO's. Andrew also writes for O'Reilly Media and blogs at HighEarthOrbit.com.
Richard D. Worth
Topic: Learning jQuery UI: Built on top of jQuery, jQuery UI is a complete set of behaviors and components for building Rich Internet Applications. Drag-and-drop, resizing, sorting, selecting, dialogs, sliders, tabs, trees, grids, toolbars, menus, etc. Each component adheres to a consistent standard across API, design, behavior and theming, minimizing surprise and making learning all of them as easy as learning one. jQuery UI has full cross-browser support, is designed for easy customizing and extensibility, and is fully themable with a widget-ready CSS Framework.
About: Richard D. Worth is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as refreshingly simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard works at Fulcrum IT on Web services contracts, primarily for the government, and blogs at rdworth.org.
Kris Zyp
Topic: Interoperable Client/Server JavaScript Web Applications - With the growing set of libraries, tools, and frameworks for JavaScript on both the client and server-side, and the rapid adoption of JSON as the standard data format of the web, developing web applications with a natural end-to-end intuitive JavaScript model is becoming a reality. We look at emerging conventions and specifications for JSON-based data interaction that provide high levels of correlation with the JavaScript data structures and build upon the REST architecture for highly interoperable modular client/server applications. On the client side, we look at how Dojo utilizes a service oriented approach with JSON-RPC or HTTP/REST with JSON referencing for data driven widgets with standards based communications. On the server side, we will see how the REST architecture combined can be combined with a JavaScript server side environment with natural object persistence and JSON schema defined class structures with Persevere, and demonstrate powerful client/server capabilities such a Comet-driven data notifications and JSON-RPC based method calls.
About: Kris Zyp is a senior engineer with SitePen, a forward-thinking company that is committed to building and enhancing the open web. He is on the OpenAjax Alliance steering committee and represents the Dojo Foundation on the EcmaScript (TC-39) committee. Kris is the lead developer of the Persevere project, a server-side JavaScript and JSON storage framework, and the JSON Schema specification. Kris is active committer for the Dojo Toolkit and he is also a contributor to a number of other specification projects including JSON-RPC, ServerJS API, and a RESTful JSON protocol.