RSConf: Review and video materials of the front-end conference in Minsk

The Rolling Scopes - Minsk community of front-end / javascript developers. We are engaged in holding meetings, workshops and Q&A sessions. And this year they have grown to the level of, I’m not afraid to say this word, an international conference . Our 20th event turned out to be larger than the rest. In this regard, I certainly want to share the details of the event, the atmosphere and, of course, the materials.
January 31st: workshop day
On the eve of the event, according to probably already generally accepted European practice of holding such events, it was decided to arrange a day of practical training. Admission was free for everyone who bought a ticket for RSConf.
ReactJS has been stealing and beeping for a long time, and we could not pass by. Viktor Khomyakov volunteered to show how to manage this framework, helped create the first "reactive" application, and answered questions from developers who already commissioned the react.

Unfortunately, there was no video recording of the workshops, so you can download the sources ( here and here ) and try to figure it out on your own.
Victor's baton was intercepted by Martin Naumann. The speaker will be presented in more detail later. The workshop theme is 3D, WebGL and the ThreeJS library.

As a result, everyone turned out to have something like this rotating illuminated cube with the RS logo on the sides:

Preparations for Martin's classes can be downloaded here .
The first day ended with Andrey Listochkin. Usually his NodeJS lesson lasts all day, but this time he was allotted only 2.5 hours, which he spent energetically communicating with those present, deftly taking conversation topics to the right audience. - Do you want security? - You are welcome. - Perfomance? - Generally not a question.

In a word, it was great to get together, get to know the speakers and participants already on the eve of the main event, and, of course, find out useful information, having immediately mastered it in practice.
- Who is going to RSConf tomorrow?

February 1: RSConf main day
They decided unanimously to make the conference in one stream: there was less of a choice between two intersecting sections of interesting reports. The lanyards of the participants stood out with their national style and gave a kind of Belarusian color. The conference program was printed on the back. Practical, convenient and it was not necessary to remind each time who our next speaker is. There were also four-color stickers, a corporate conference shirt with a snowflake, and commemorative badges. That's, in fact, what the entire set of the participant consisted of. No handouts with booklets, no hiring and exchange of electronic mailboxes for sweets.

Hakon Wium Lie: Why CSS was invented
It was an honor to open the conference to the Norwegian Hakon Wim Lee. More precisely, it was our honor that CTO Opera Software decided to fly to Minsk and participate in the local front-end movement. True, it is unfortunate that it was not possible to communicate with him live. The plane from Oslo to Riga was delayed a bit, and Hakon did not have time for a connecting flight to the capital of Belarus. Therefore, the program was a little shuffled and an online broadcast from the Latvian capital was organized for the report.
A few facts about the speaker:
- worked at CERN hand in hand with Tim Berners Lee;
- CSS creator;
- activist of W3C web standards in general (video, web fonts, Acid2, etc);
- Member of the Pirate Party of Norway;
- launched an advertising campaign in Oslo against tall buildings and street advertising;
- Owns his own farm and woodworking workshop;
- his name is quite difficult to pronounce , especially the English-speaking part of the population, so howcome was a kind of simplification .
Hakon himself is a very positive person. He reacted very easily to the scoundrels of fate that forced him to read the report from Riga, and in the morning he began to set the tone for the conference, smiling affably at the camera from the hotel room and skillfully working with the audience even at such a distance. The report was richly saturated with rare photos from CERN, the history of the creation of www and specifically CSS.
Video report (up to the 11th minute there will be a greeting from the organizers, then - a speech by Hakon):
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer: Using ECMAScript 6 today
Axel is a programmer with 30 years of experience in web development since 1995, an organizer of the Munich frontend community, a speaker at major conferences, his 2ality.com blog is very popular in the javascript world. He also writes, writes books and conducts trainings for developers.
With surprising ease, he responded to a proposal to speak in Minsk and long before the conference he began to study Russian (upon arrival, of course, he also mastered phrases pa-Belarusian).
The video of his one and a half hour slot on ES6 aspects from the Minsk conference fell into the weekly selection of javascriptweekly.com . As a result, at the moment it was watched by about 5 thousand users. We suggest you to understand ECMAScript 2015 in detail.
Part I:
Part II:
Martin Naumann: The visual web of today and tomorrow - WebGL and WebVR
Martin is a very cool and energetic speaker. Having met in it at the SpainJS conference two years ago, we simply could not help but invite him to RSConf. He literally overwhelmed us with the ideas of the reports and gladly agreed to hold a workshop on the eve of the conference. As a result, we opted for virtual reality - a very interesting thing that has not yet entered our everyday lives, but in the near and foreseeable future it will undoubtedly become a part of our life.
Martin works for a Swiss startup specializing in WebGL project development. In particular, now he is busy with a project of virtual furniture arrangement according to the model of your apartment. A very useful thing when moving or checking into a new home.
Martin’s report contains a lot of demos (his project, Leap Motion, WebGL prettiness), a bit of coding on Three.js and of course a permanent line of questions / answers on Web Virtual Reality:
Suddenly there was a lunch break. At this hour, front-end tenders not only refueled for further assimilation of conference materials. As Martin said in his report, the organizers somehow magically coaxed the Oculus Rift, and although it was not possible to connect his project due to the unstable assembly of FIREFOX VR, people were able to try the standard demos and walk around the virtual room, try to sit on a chair that so realistic conveyed Oculus, that could easily fall to a very real floor.

Another fun thing was picking up HTML tags bit by bit. Fortunately, each lanyard had its own letter, and we had to cooperate, parse the audience and look for the right person. How the “blockquote” was assembled remains a mystery to us.

The guys in the next photo decided to create, and if the tags don't smell here, then the phrase is just fire! Quite real contenders for victory. Indeed, for her everyone will have a free ticket for the next RSConf. In our group in FB there will soon be a vote for the best photo, of which there were many. And all by no means with censorship words!

One hour passed quickly, and it was time to return to the reports again.
Cyril Demura: Aperiodic tiling
Cyril is a CSS nerd that can animate everything that moves in a browser. As part of the lightning report at the conference, he talked about his sudden passion, the theses of which are presented below:
- How to generate an avatar for a user by his ID;
- What are parquet floors (periodic, non-periodic and aperiodic), why are they needed, how to work and use with it;
- What is chemistry related to parquet floors?
- Analysis on the shelves of the game "Life" on aperiodic flooring.
The presentation is very colorful, detailed and not simple:
Juha Paananen: FRP with Bacon.js
The hot Finnish guy Juha is an adherent of functional reactive programming in the javascript world, the creator of the most popular FRP library BaconJS.
Live coding and demos on BaconJS, the philosophy of this library and the approach as a whole is first-hand from Juha Paanen:
Andrey Listochkin: Ember = Angular = React
Andrey flew to us from Kiev. He is an active participant and organizer of the Ukrainian front-end community, participates in hackathons and conducts trainings. His report was the most fun, and even with a holivary name, excellent presentation and deep essence. He parses and rinses the bones of architectures and development on each of the three declared frameworks.
The equipment chewed the last 5 minutes of the report, but Andrey's slides can be found here .
Dmitry Lomov: Javascript at the speed of light
Dmitry Lomov (Google, Munich) has been programming for two decades and managed to work at JetBrains, Microsoft and Google. Currently involved in the development of V8 / Blink, he is also a member of the TC39 JavaScript Standardization Committee (Ecmascript) from the Google V8 team.
In the report, Dmitry talks about the intimate details of the V8, as well as what problems the platform faces and how they can still be solved. "Use stricter + types" is the new best friend of js optimizer. In his presentation, Dmitry gives an answer to the following question: why with live TypeScript, Dart, Flow, you also need SoundScript, the support of which the V8 team plans to make. Dr. Axel Rauschmeier wrote an article directly in Minsk based on the report and postedher to your blog. Nevertheless, it is very pleasant that RSConf participants were the first public audience (immediately after the javascript committee in Mountain View), which heard about the innovations and was able to ask Dmitry tricky questions.
Report video:
At the conference there was a simultaneous translation of reports both from English into Russian, and vise-versa. Headsets were not particularly popular: only 10 percent gave their ID in exchange for a translation that had already begun to understand the development of a translator (the fact is that he had already translated two conferences on the front-end in Minsk, and I think that he is already quite capable of filing a website for himself ) True, Severin Kistner from Munich checked out the devices.
Simultaneous translation at #RSConf works surprisingly well.
- Severin Kistner (@sekistner) February 1, 2015
An interesting fact: a conference ticket cost $ 30, and Severin gave 180 € for a blue-eyed visa: what the craving for new knowledge just doesn't do. In general, he really liked the selection of speakers, and he will definitely come to Minsk again at an event of this level. It was worth it, Seva!
Gregor Adams: Discovering fractals with CSS
RS Crew was at the dotCSS conference in Paris and got acquainted with the work of Gregor Adams. After his then vivid presentation, insidious plans immediately appeared to invite him to Minsk. Just look at Adam's work on CodePen . Incredible things in CSS.
At the conference, his report coolly unloaded the information flow coming from previous speakers, and gradually the falling asleep part of the hall was invigorated from sleep. Fortunately, the fractals dancing to the “Sail” were worth it: beautiful, dynamic, inspiring.
CSS Quiz
The competition from Sasha Gerasimov completed the official part of the conference.
Its meaning was this: participants open a link in a browser. Through web sockets, the client connects to the server, and registration occurs in the system. After everyone has taken the previous step, the host
An example of one of the tasks looks exactly like this:

The bottom line is simple: the user in the submitted layout must select the highlighted html tags. 2 minutes are given for the passage of the stage, the time of each participant is fixed, and the first is given a point, the second - two, and so on. After 10 stages, the entire amount is knocked out, and at the least the participants are ranked in the final protocol.
Of course, magic and problems were not completely dispensed with - there were such selectors that collapsed the backend, and if after one restoration of the system the game continued on, then subsequently someone sent the ill-fated selector all the time, and they decided to knock out the result according to the current results.
By the way, the scissor hand front-end fighters fought not just for respect or virtual honor, but there was also a quite material prize - Google ChromeBook Pixel, awarded to the winner by PandaDoc (our old friends and partners).

Quiz sources will be uploaded to our github , but only after JS Quickdraw is also conducted.
Afterparty
We, as the organizers, did not bother much, and especially in the midst of the crisis, there was no budget for large-scale events at the Minsk Arena, so even during the quiz in the IBB center, BeerJS started with a delicious draft, which heated up the degree of discussion and the ability to communicate. Thanks to the photo box, the participants could immediately take home a certificate where they were all Sunday February 1. It was possible to take such a picture with the speakers:

Axel says so: do you use ES6 # right now?
February 5, workshop “Improving Smashing Magazine's Performance: A Case Study”
The conference was so eventful that the workshop of Smashing Magazine editor Vitaly Fridman did not fit on the main day of the conference. But, as they say, no matter what is done, all for the better: one hour of the workshop would not be enough for the participants. Therefore, on February 5, on Thursday (the traditional day for our meetings), he talked for two and a half hours, how did SmashingMagazine manage to reach 100 points in PageSpeed for mobile devices.

Slides and photos
All presentations, photos and video reports are carefully added to the conference overview page .
What gives us strength to move on
Thanks @rollingscopes conference! I met many interesting people and learned a lot from various discussions. #ar_trav
- Axel Rauschmayer (@rauschma) February 2, 2015
Many thanks to #rsconf in Minsk for having me! Excellent audience and a great chance to discuss some of our ideas.
- Dmitry Lomov (@mulambda) February 1, 2015
It was a long and busy day at #rsconf Delight, joy, beloved seals
- Ginger Witch (@ imp313) February 1, 2015
That ended #RSConf Thanks to the organizers and speakers. I was glad to see friends and virtualize;) Until next time!
- Anna (@asktwi) February 1, 2015
Plus a small review from RSConf member Pavel Drobushevich can be found here .
Feedback collected through the form and feedback left during the conference let us know that we are going in the right direction and moving the whole js development community forward. Thank you for your participation and kind words, without you nothing would have happened!
Finally
As you understand, this was not the last event with us. The 15th meeting has already taken place in February, and there will be Polymer and ES6 workshops in the near future.
Thank you for reading the note to the end.

It was cool. See you soon friends! Let's roll!