HolyJS 2018 Moscow through the eyes of the participant

Recently held HolyJS 2018 Moscow. Passed - fire, but ...

When choosing this conference, I wanted to find more information about how it passes at all - there were many articles from the organizers and the program committee, but only one from the participant, and that one was published several years ago. I hasten to fix it.

For the first time I managed to attend such a large-scale event, there were a lot of impressions left, so I present to your attention a review of the conference and a list of the best, in my opinion, reports.

Conference Overview

At the same time, there were three reports each, so it was important not to make a mistake and to choose the most interesting one in advance.

Each report was assigned one of the categories:

• introduction to technology (smoothies),
• practicing engineers
• hardcore

Part of the reports was in English. And it is worth noting that all speakers have their own way of talking: someone speaks quickly, someone swallows the words, so be prepared for this. But even if you did not understand something, everything becomes clear on the slides.

The funniest part of the conference was between presentations. There were a lot of stands at the exhibition, where everyone could solve problems, play a set-top box and just find out what other developers were working on. The atmosphere is so friendly and relaxed that it was not difficult for someone to engage in conversation about technology, work, discuss reports, etc. The



photo from the exhibition booth

I liked the battles the most! By layout - Code in the dark, and by js - JS Battle. Everything is done in the format of games.

In short:

• Code in the dark . The layout of the layout is given, the task is to do it in 10 minutes without being able to see the result in the browser.
• JS Battle - role - playing game , visually similar to the "Heroes of the sword and magic." Each player chooses his characters, writes a script to fight with the enemy, focusing on the documentation.

It seems to me that this perfectly coaches the writing of code in a tense environment, plus speed, plus the code must be of high quality, otherwise you will lose.

Summing up both days, I can say that the second day of the conference was harder than the first. Fatigue affected, especially after the party.

Reports

I will highlight a few, in my opinion, interesting.

My favorite is the report “Deep immersion in a webpack” - Stas Kurilov . The author wrote several loaders for svg sprite , looked into the webpack sources and described the stages of his work. The most frequent comment of Stas was: “without a half-liter you will not understand here”. It can be understood ... But still, he figured out :)



"Paranoid Service Worker" - Vsevolod Rodionov . Report on vulnerabilities in applications, browser, API, how to fix them and about the unusual use of Service workers in order to improve security.



An excellent report - “Building a GraphQL-server” - Pavel Chertorogov . The author describes vigorously and in detail what GraphQL is, how it is better than the REST API, what a scheme is, it considers various packages and libraries. The report is directed not only to frontends, but it will be interesting to backups.



“What if Picasso was a robot?” (“What if Picasso were a robot?”) - Isa Silveira .

Report on machine learning in art. The girl made a neural network and trained her in Picasso's paintings. The report is quite simple, but makes you wonder. Philosophical questions came to mind: can neural network pictures be considered art? And would you buy such a picture?



I would like to separately highlight accessibility.

For those who do not know well what it is, but wonders, the report “Developing Affordable Graphs” is suitable - Sergey Krieger , where the author simply and vividly explains the basics with the example of available graphs.



As well as the report “A11Y IRL (Accessibility in real life)” (“Accessibility in real life”) - Theodore Vorillas .

Theodore wanted to create an electronic braille board - a device that would become an alternative to books written in Braille, but cheaper. The board may consist of one or several plates that reproduce the letters using a web application . The author even demonstrated a working copy.

Total

In memory of the conference remained cute duck-Vader for the application of the psychological method of solving problems and excellent memories.

I hope my review was useful for you.

Feel free to go to meetings and conferences, because there you can learn a lot of interesting things, get inspired by new achievements and, of course, hang out.

A detailed report on the conference

PS Only a month or two will publish video reports. Be sure to attach them to the article.