My trip to Berlin was only brief but nonetheless a great success. On the sixth and seventh of October, 44 talks were held over 2 days and presented on 2 stages (the production hall and the “bubble”) in the “Alte Münze”. The bubble was a fun transparent room made of plastic which was filled with chair cushions. Instead of listing all the talks that were given, I’d like to briefly point out my favorites (the full list of talks is available at 2012.jsconf.eu).
The keynote speech
This isn’t necessarily a talk, but was still highly noteworthy with Jed Schmidt singing about CSS and JS with Mandy Lauderdale. Unfortunately the video isn’t available yet, so keep an eye on youtube.com/jsconfeu.
John Bender – Faster JavaScript with Category Theory
This talk considered a new approach as to how jQuery could be speed up internally.
Check out Wield: https://github.com/johnbender/wield
Angus Croll – Break all the rules
This talk was an interesting demonstration showing that certain “demonized” techniques are not that evAl ;) if you use them wisely. Examples of this included double-equals coercion, iteration without hasOwnProperty, extending native prototypes, and even using ‘eval’ and ‘with’. It’s always good to know what’s going on under the hood.
Remy Sharp – iframes: A look into the black heart of the browsers
In the bubble we saw that iframes were and still are in fact quite scary. Remy Sharp shed some light on them, showing that it does not matter whether it is about nested iframes or that a page can share infos with an iframe cross-browser using the “.name”-property of its window object.
Kamen Bundev – Fixing the Mobile Web – tips and tricks that can save your sanity
This talk explained how to behave like a snake that wriggles around all these little differences in the mobile WebKit wasteland where every fix can potentially open another can of worms. This might be frustrating but it would seem there is a solution to every problem. Kamen showed an impressive collection of fixes.
Andrew Miadowicz – What does Chakra do with your JavaScript?
This talk showed the internals of Chakra and the changes that have been made for IE10. Andrew spoke about the profiling interpreter, type system, optimizing compiler, and garbage collector.
Find more about Chakra in this blog post:
Blog article about performance in IE 10 and Windows 8
Chris Williams – Disconnect
Announced as the “father of JSConf”, it was his talk that closed the event better than anything else. There was nothing technical involved, just a short talk about disconnecting technical devices and enjoying a day with the family, reading a book or something like that instead of hunting for the greatest possible number of re-tweets.
My favorite quote:
“Rules are only barriers to prevent children from falling”. Everyone should try things out. There is the right situation for everything.
When traveling back to Hamburg I felt a tingling in my fingers. To all of you out there, check out Nightly Builds and their new features. There are plenty of new things to be tested which, despite their specs not being final yet, are a lot of fun and give you a good impression of what the stable versions will soon be capable of.