A merger, some dogs and more at Node + JS Interactive 2018

A mixture of front and back end presentations focused on performance and scalability set the stage for the biggest announcement out of this month’s Node + JS Interactive conference in Vancouver, where Kenzan was a silver sponsor.

Scott Pullano (left), a director of engineering at Kenzan talks to attendees about the serverless application that his team built for the Node + JS interactive conference.

On the first day of the developer-centric conference, it was announced that the two hosting foundations would merge, bringing the two intertwined communities even closer together. With several sessions and workshops dedicated to growing the Node.js core, it’s clear that this next chapter will be an exciting one, and as members of the JS Foundation, we’re certainly looking forward to it.

The view from the Vancouver Convention Centre, the venue for the 2018 Node + JS Interactive Conference

While the announcement of the merger was the biggest news to come out of the event, it wasn’t the only highlight. Besides the breathtaking views from the Vancouver Convention Centre and some puppies for attendees to play with, there was a lot to take in. Here’s some highlights from the Kenzan developers that were on the ground:

Kenzan’s booth in the exhibitor hall was conveniently located next to npm, who brought a long some furry friends to keep us company during the event.

Progressive web apps are all the rage

From Adobe to Mozilla to Comcast, there were several talks focused on converting website apps into progressive web apps. Many sited a Google study that stated that most users will leave a webpage if content doesn’t load after six seconds, so it’s no wonder that there were so many presentations on the topic. Progressive web apps can help reduce this risk by using service workers that cache data on an app, resulting in a boost in performance when loading content. They also allow users to have a seamless experience across devices, even if they don’t have an internet connection.

Scaling with JavaScript

We seem to be past the point of having to prove why JavaScript is a good choice for modern development and are entering a stage of figuring out the best ways to use it, specifically at a large scale. Topics like incorporating a service mesh, using Docker, leveraging Kubernetes, and serverless were popular because they aren’t often spoken in a Node.js context. Loopback 4, a complete rewrite of IBMs API creation framework, was released on the first day of the conference and several talks were dedicated to explaining how it solved common problems of large-scale Node.js API development.

Component-driven development is still king

There seemed to be less introductory talks and more talks on optimization for performance, including a handful of talks that pushed for progressive web applications to be the new default for building sites going forward. It was nice to hear how others are addressing the trickier parts of JavaScript development, like math “gotchas,” dates, design patterns, Node error-handling, internationalization, security, and performance. Additionally, we got insight into several up-and-coming (but often misunderstood) trends, like WebAssembly, machine learning in the browser, and ASTs.

Contributors:

Matthew Gardner, Front End Developer, Providence
Paul Barry, Technical Architect, Providence
Craig Freeman, Technical Architect, Denver