Hot Chicken and Cool Code

Hot Chicken and Cool Code

The weekend of November 14-15, 2015 I had the privilege to attend the Nodevember conference hosted at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. There were a number of things that attracted me to the conference. The heavy emphasis on NodeJS, the encouragement to participate in new technologies, but most of all it was the speaker list.

There were 520 participants at the conference, meaning that there were a significant number of developers at all skill levels taking part in two days of intense learning about the progress being made in the NodeJS world.

Yehuda Katz was the opening keynote speaker. Yehuda is the author of major libraries such as HandlebarsJS and Tokaido, member of the EmberJS core team, former member of the Rails and jQuery core teams, this guy is the real deal. He delivered the opening keynote, and challenged the audience to think about how frameworks were not a limiting factor in development, but an empowering one. Given his reputation in the open-source and JavaScript communities, the presentation was one that was greeted warmly instead of with hostility.

Douglas Crockford, the so-called "grandfather" of JavaScript and the inventor of technologies such as JSLint, JSMin and JSON, not to mention the author of JavaScript: The Good Parts gave a closing keynote on his Seif Project that he is pioneering with the support of Paypal, his employer. It has the goal of transitioning the web into a rich application delivery system that is more reliable and secure than the current model.

One of the surprising stand-outs at the conference was the amount of attention being paid to bootcamps. There was a talk by Aimee Knight, a graduate of the Nashville Software School, on her path to becoming a full-time JavaScript developer with SparkPost in Baltimore, given her origins as a competitive figure skater. SparkPost was also a sponsor of the conference. It was refreshing to see bootcamps being presented as a viable, and even desirable, path to getting involved in the development community.

While the conference was focused on NodeJS and server-side JavaScript, there were a number of speakers who talked about the ReactJS framework, popularized and designed by Facebook. React seems to be considered an industry-leading best practice framework in the JS community, and many of its abilities were highlighted at the conference, including React Native. React Native gives developers the ability to design mobile apps in the React framework, without the need for additional libraries and frameworks like PhoneGap/Cordova.

Overall, this was an incredibly well-run, insightful and informative conference. Kudos definitely go to William Golden and his team of volunteers and organizers for the high quality of the conference. Lipscomb University was the host, and their campus is beautiful.

The speaking venues were close together and there was ample space for the many participants. Another impressive contribution to the event was the catering by Sifted, a local catering company that delivered very high-quality Southern food in ample quantities.

I am already looking forward to next year's event, and to implementing what I have learned this year.