The second week of February, Web Chefs Patrick and Flip visited San Francisco for the Forward 4 Web Technology Summit.
On Tuesday, we attended the Four Semesters of Computer Science in Six Hours workshop in the Microsoft office (which is fun to say). While there was no degree handed out at the end, Brian Holt and Marshall Upshur from Netflix shared a tremendous amount of critical knowledge. Attendees, regardless of their backgrounds, were able to quickly get up to speed on subjects including the recreation of sorting algorithms and the basics of functional programming in JavaScript. The material was very well written and delivered, and we learned a lot from Brian and Marshall.
The Machine Learning 101 in Javascript workshop led by Jed Borovik we attended on Thursday covered the creation of simple neural networks from scratch in Node.
The keynote address was another notable moment of the conference. Kassandra Perch gave an excellent talk about building bots with Node.js, and emphasized the importance of maintaining a code of conduct in open source communities like NodeBot. She demonstrated the importance of encouraging an atmosphere of kindness and patience in a community by showing us how quickly the NodeBot community has grown, and how pleasant it is to be a community member. Douglass Crockford spoke on the broken state of the web, and his plan for solving some of the challenges that we currently face in the world of networked applications.
Overall, the summit was a pleasure to attend; we were able to meet some great people, learn about the future of JavaScript and JavaScript’s wide range of communities, and we even had time to work on some pet projects in our spare time.
- This post was written by Flip Stewart and Patrick Coffey.*
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