It’s easy to get stuck in a filter bubble of technologies that we use to solve our problems. Good conference will challenge your view on how you solve problems and present novel concepts. Mloc.js (million lines of JavaScript) was such a conference. Main idea behind the talks was how to manage projects with such a wast code bases.
Things I learned, that will influence my future projects:
- Reactive programming is growing and it looks it’s going to stay. One way bindings and data flows make it much easier to manage state in Single Page Applications.
- One way bindings with immutable data, fit well with functional programming. A lot of new experiments are in FP domain.
- Compile to JavaScript is the way forwared. ES6 is nice, but currently the money is on building better tooling, instead of staying with JavaScript. TypeScript looks like a good starting point. Having types allows for better static analysis and IDE integration.
- Concepts like graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are out. The only context in which people care about HTML is for Search Engines. If you can render good enough version of Website for Google – you don’t have to worry about anything else.
- It seems that new solutions target only evergreen browsers.
I do see a lot of challenges. We’ll have to train people to understand FP. Now it’s a good time to pick up your Haskell book, once again.
I’ll also have to switch my tooling to TypeScript and replace jQuery with another layer of abstraction on top of it.
Jay for the speed of progress and the fact that I now how to learn completely new skills, while still staying ‘just’ a web developer.