JavaScript Tips & Best Practices

Date:

  Wednesday 26 February 2014

Application opens: 

Friday 17 January 2014

Contact: 

Johanna Langrish

Registration closed

Overview

Three days of JavaScript for modern web development

If you have some experience with JavaScript already, perhaps a background in programming, come and learn tips and best practices for using JavaScript in modern web development. Everything from hints, tricks, and gotchas to debugging, optimisation and deployment. We’ll look at module loading, data handling, and testing, and we will give you an opportunity to speak about what you’re working on.

​All of this will take place over three days, with two days of hands-on workshops led by two well know JavaScript developer Tim Ruffles and Ben Howdle.  On the third day, Tim and Ben will provide an introduction to popular JavaScript libraries, we will have a keynote talk from founder and CEO of Cambridge Intelligence, Joe Parry, and we will hear from some of our participants about their work. 

Who this is for

Developers, this is for you. Assuming you have some basic knowledge of JavaScript, this event will help you consolidate what you already know, and build up your skills from there. It will also be a great way for you to meet other developers, share ideas, and maybe be inspired to try new things with JavaScript.

Programme

 

Time Topic
Day 1 -­ Wednesday 26 February 2014 - Modern JavaScript
10:00 - 10:10 Introduction
10.10 -­ 10.35 Tricksy bits of Javascripts to ignore -­ subset, JSHint etc
10.35 -­ 10.55 Tricksy bits of Javascript you want to understand: scope
10.55 -­ 11.15 Javascript idioms, getting the ‘missing features’
11:15 - 11:35 Implementing data-­structures in JS
11.35 -­ 11.55 Module loaders, module systems
11.55 -­ 12.20 Debugging
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
13.30 -­ 13.50 Overview of JS performance -­ what’s actually slow
13:50 - 14:00 Optimisation -­ profiling, basic performance
14:00 - 14:10 Getting Data
14:10 - 14:50 OOP in JS
14:50 -­ 15:30 Functional Programming in JS
15:30 - 15:45 Tea/coffee break
15:45 - 16:10 Asynchronous Code
16:10 - 16:35 ES5, ES6
16:35 - 16:45 Solving problems the JavaScript way
17:00 End of course day
Day 2 - Thursday 27 February 2014 - Finishing Modern JavaScript & Testing JavaScript & JavaScript Tools
09:30 - 10:05 Deploying JavaScript
10:05 - 10:35 Introduction to and the goals of testing
10:35 - 11:35 TDD/BDD
11:35 - 12:35 Functional Testing
12:35 - 13:30 Lunch 
13:30 - 14:30 DOM -­ jQuery, ‘Vanilla’
14:30 - 15:30 MVC - Backbone
15:30 - 15:45 Tea/coffee break
15:45 - 16:45 MVC -­ Backbone
17:00 Close of course day
Day 3 - Friday 28 February 2014 - Finishing JavaScript Tools & Other Activities planned by Francis & Rafael
09:30 - 11:30 Angular JS
11:30 - 12:30 Data Visualisation (d3.js)
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 15:30 Other activities planned by Francis Rowland and Rafael Jiminez
15:30 - 15:45 Tea/coffee break
15:45 - 17:00 Other activities planned by Francis Rowland and Rafael Jiminez

More about who is involved

We are very lucky to have Tim Ruffles deliver the workshop and half-day of talks. Tim is a Ruby & JavaScript Developer living and working in London. Having previously worked for Skimlinks as their tech lead, he now spends time mentoring others and working on SidekickJS, his code-quality tracking tool. You can find him speaking about the web at various events.

Ben Howdle is a software developer for Kashflow and describes himself as a "JavaScript guy at heart". Ben has worked on many projects over the years including SVGeezy, Cortado and Heisenberg.js; whilst also being one half of the Upfront Podcast on Front-End Web Development.

​We are also delighted to host Joe Parry as our guest speaker on the afternoon of the third day. Joe is a researcher, tech lead, architect. Founder and CEO of Cambridge Intelligence, he specializes in designing visualization systems for intelligence analysts. ​The event is organised by Rafael C Jimenez (ELIXIR Chief Technical Officer) and Francis Rowland (UX Designer at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute) in conjunction with Event Handler, organisers of great events for developers and geeks.