A JavaScript-everywhere framework for easily building fast web apps

Synopsis

The web is in a period of transformation. No longer do servers render HTML that get sent down to the browser. Instead, in modern web apps all rendering is done in the browser, and the server only sends down data. Meteor is a framework for easily building apps in the modern way. Meteor solves all parts of the problem -- from the server components, the data protocols, the client rendering and the packaging system.

This type of modern web app is not only technically superior -- it also allows for a significantly better user experience. With last-generation frameworks (such as PHP, Django or Rails), "AJAX" lets you update part of a page in place but you still wait for the server on any user action. With Meteor, the user almost never waits. All changes are enacted in the browser immediately and sent to the server in the background. It's what you expect from any decent desktop or offline iOS app. Meteor gives your apps this type of experience out-of-the-box.

Speaker: Avital Oliver

Avital Oliver has researched finite group theory, built tactical systems for the Israeli Air Force, founded a school of mathematics for all, and worked Asana before joining Meteor, where he now works as a core developer.

Parse Hosting

Synopsis

Jamie will be leading a session on using Parse Hosting to build a dynamic web app. He will cover getting setup with Parse Hosting, saving data to Parse, logging in with Facebook, and using Cloud Code to run custom javascript on Parse's servers. He will go through a full-fledged example app built using Backbone.js and Parse Hosting to demonstrate how easy and powerful using Parse to back your web app can be.

Speaker: Jamie Karraker

Jamie loves building stuff, which he spent a summer doing on the Social Plugins team at Facebook before going back to school to get his Masters. There he helped build a machine vision system to protect police officers stopped on the roadside. At Parse Jamie works as a Software Engineer on all things mobile and web. Jamie received his M.Eng. in Computer Science and his B.S. in EECS and Physics from MIT.

React.JS

Synopsis

Paul O’Shannessy and Ben Newman are engineers at Facebook. They will be talking about React.js - an open source JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React incorporates principals of declarative programming to allow you to build these highly interactive UIs without worrying about complicated DOM manipulations. Topics will relate to declarative/functional programming and will prepare you to use React.js. We’ll walk through some real-world examples and have time for your questions following the lecture.

Speakers: Paul O’Shannessy and Ben Newman

Building Lots of Source Code Quickly

Synopsis

Most successful software products, including Appian's, consist of millions of lines of source code and hundreds of thousands of automated tests. That's a lot to build! With dozens of engineers making changes to the code every day, how do you avoid spending all your time waiting for builds to complete and tests to run? Learn how to use continuous integration, caching, and other people's cores to build most of the code so you don't have to.

Speaker: Dan Mascenik

Dan Mascenik is Appian's Vice President of Engineering. Dan oversees the design and development of the Appian platform, and is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Engineering department. He has over 12 years of experience with cloud-based enterprise software platforms. Dan holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Go Revel

Synopsis

We will give you a crash course on the Go language, including:

• Motivation: Why create a new language?
• Design: What makes Go different?
• Tools: What does the Go development process look like? (live demo)
• A Quiz: With prizes.
• Resources: A take-home curriculum for becoming an expert Gopher.
• Then we will introduce you to Revel (github.com/robfig/revel), a web framework in the spirit of Rails or Play! for developing web applications in Go. We'll provide an overview of the design and give a live demo of developing a sample application.

Speakers: Rob Figueiredo and Lee Tacon

Rob Figueiredo ('05 6-2, '06 M.Eng) is a Software Engineering Manager at Yext. He develops new technology and products to help businesses publish their local data online. He has been working with Go since 2011 starting with Revel and including other open source Go projects. Revel now has almost 3k stars on Github and has applications in production at Yext and elsewhere. Rob came to Yext after three years at Google NYC (AdWords).

Lee Tacon joined Yext in June of 2013 as a Software Engineer and has been using Revel in several projects. Lee holds a masters degree in Computer Science from JHU.