What happens at LXJS, doesn't stay at LXJS

Here are a few of my notes / thoughts on my experience from LXJS (http://2014.lxjs.org/).

TLDR; It was amazing, inspiring and I want to go to the next one!

The venue

Wow. Much as been said about this on twitter, but the location (http://2014.lxjs.org/location/) of the venue was awesome, literally.

awe·some [aw-suhm] adjective 1. inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear; causing or inducing awe: an awesome sight. 2. showing or characterized by reverence, admiration, or fear; exhibiting or marked by awe. 3. Slang. very impressive: That new white convertible is totally awesome.

It was based in Estufa Fria (a greenhouse/gardens) in the center of Lisbon. Thankfully it wasn’t a true greenhouse, it was actually cooler than the outside as the roof was slatted wood and offered delightful shade. Being able to take a step out of the hall and be in a cool tropical paradise (with fast wifi) was a joy.

To top it off, the venue had a brilliant logistics team who kept us all well fed and watered throughout. Bravo.

The presentations

Varied in topics, high in quality. Calling out a few bellow that caught my attention, but you can see them all on the LXJS youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/user/lxjs2012/videos

Chrome team show new toys (aka Componentize the web!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOPXVLxp9Nc

To go along with the recently released “Materials Design” http://www.google.com/design/ the chrome team has been working on something called Polymer.

Polymer (http://www.polymer-project.org/) wants to turn everything into a component and lets you enhance and extend the. Worth a look.

Web Audio (aka Audio for the masses)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqj9LDszlDY

As someone who isn’t hugely musical, i wasn’t expecting the web audio talk to be of huge interest, but a snip-it at the end of the presentation did spark my imagination.

Using audio as a broadcast network layer, specifically FM.

Mozilla’s $25 phone comes with and FM receiver. Were that to be used to pick up a local FM channel, for data, you’ve got yourself a nice little local broadcast system for all sorts of things. A bit like a http://chirp.io/ or http://www.slicklogin.com/ system, but for an entire town.

Google also seem to be thinking about using audio as a network with their chromecast : http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/06/26/chromecast-will-use-ultrasonic-sound-for-location-based-casting-on-separate-networks/

WebRTC (Peer to Peer web)

? Video to follow i guess

An interesting look at a under exposed part of the new web world. WebRTC is peer to peer communication for web browsers. Very fun. Can (and should) expose some new and exciting solutions to problems.

Some cool examples :

• https://www.sharefest.me/ - Send a file direct to someone, no middle man. Super fast.
• https://talky.io/ - Think Google Hangouts or Skype group call - with no app or setup!
• https://peercdn.com/ - Clever concept, uses people viewing your site as the CDN.

ChromeCast uses WebRTC : http://www.webrtcworld.com/topics/from-the-experts/articles/347900-chromecast-webrtc.htm

Others of note

• Service Workers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1KQGDRNepI Think in an #OfflineFirst way.
• Learning Happens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGNwZu3KJlE A packaged RaspberyPi designed to be the ZX spectrum/BBC Micro/Atari for the next generation.
• Atom.io - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyFdr9zVPHE GitHub showing off their editor.
• Invest. Amplify. Educate. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK2og2MSUCs Life long learning, not waterfall (all at the start) learning.
• Hapi are the developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFSB1bjkjbI Hapi, Wallmart’s API framework.
• Extending DevTools - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohF_exBsQYQ Build your own Chrome dev tools.

Training sessions

There were a range of training session (wish i could have attended them all), but you could only pick 4 (and i could only pick 3 due to needing to leave early on day 2).

HapiJS

I’ve been using and learning Hapi for a while, so the chance to talk with its creators was too good to miss.

We learned plenty of new things and got some direction on a few head scratchers we had encountered.

Check out NPM makemehapi (https://github.com/spumko/makemehapi)

Dtrace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace

Wow. Just wow. I don’t get 90% of what Dtrace can do, but i know its powerful and when i need it, its there.

Was also some very impressive work with core dumps, brining the crashed app back to life and being able to interrogate its dieing moments to see why it crashed.

Internet Of Things

Using the RaspberyPi and AirPi (http://airpi.es/) to make a weather station that reported its finding back to a cloud provider.

Honorable mentions

Driift

https://lxjs.driift.io/ / http://signup.driift.io/

A NFC tag on the conference badge that let you tag people you talk to and build a contact list for the event. Very cool.

@dscape & @nunoveloso

The Nuno’s behind my attendance, convincing me it was a good idea and not taking no for an answer.

Corbis & Demotix

For sending me!

Conclusions

Loved it. Learned a lot. Met some brilliant people. Will be returning next year!