JSFoo 2019, Bangalore

We, at Neptune, are always for supporting various learning prospects that our developers might be interested in, be it in-house or outbound.

This time, some of our teammates brought up the proposal of attending JSFoo’2019.

JSFoo is HasGeek’s annual JavaScript conference which is in its 9th edition this year. The conference took place on 27 and 28 September, 2019, at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore.

Hence, 4 of our developers (Ashish Bagdane, Shivam Dwivedi, Madhuri Chavan and Jahanvee Lekhak) took time and managed their work schedules to travel to Bangalore for the same.

The subject for JSFoo 2019 was component architecture.

With the advent of technology, web applications nowadays is a concoction of multiple components such as React, Angular, Vue, Ember and others. Thus, the talks mostly surrounded topics like:

1. Architecting applications with wide no. of components.. The complexities that arise and how to tackle the same?

2. Cases where the applications had intricate design of front-end components like Angular and Vue working together and how the interaction with back-end takes place in such scenarios.

3. Process organisations and workflow of the web development teams that work on the above mentioned architecture

4. Latest developments taking place under the Javascript umbrella

5. Security concerns including framework specific security and authentication

6. Best development, testing, debugging, performance optimization practises

There were speakers sharing their findings and methods from big and small organisations like Razorpay, CloudCherry, Myntra, Innovaccer, GitLab, Microsoft, Atlassian and Gramener.

With so many concepts put forth, some talks that our team really enjoyed were:

1. Speaker : Nadia Makarevich, who is a senior developer, tech lead at Atlassian, spoke about history of front-end in Jira, how and why it changed in the following years and how Jira built its own architectural guidelines around state-management

2: Speaker : Anand S, who is a co-founder of Gramener, spoke about expressing data visualizations by evoking emotions – in the form of comics. All this is done by one Javascript utility that’s created by them which breaks down comic characters into structured components

Alongside this, there were talks about ClojureScript, ReasonML, StimulusJS, Svelte,etc and the reasons and benefits of using them.

There was also a session called Birds of Feathers where speakers addressed questions from participants on a general level on different topics of front-end, challenges faced, potential solutions, etc.

As for us, we could bring home some answers to the challenges we faced/currently facing for our front-end applications from the talks and discussions.

What was surprising to know was that our challenges are so very common to what giant organisations like Microsoft, Myntra, Jabong, etc. face, and it was so enlightening to have potential workarounds for them.

JSFoo was a one of its kind of workshop for brainstorming and the experience, all in all, was great.

Nevertheless, we are always on the lookout for any such event and are keen on gaining new technical insights!

Looking forward to many more conferences and workshops in the future!