Activate Conference

Why JavaScript? It’s everywhere. There is a large community and tons of career opportunities. Also, It's Fun! Why p5.js for game development? p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the goal to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. Also, It's Fun!

The best product shops in the world such as Google, Tesla, AirBnB and Apple have built teams that are comprised of designers, project managers, researchers, anthropologists, storytellers and developers with a single end in mind — to create a beautiful experience for their users. To be a great developer you must also think like a designer. Not in terms of colors and fonts, but in terms of empathy. You must understanding how users interact with your product and how their interactions shape the way you build. User Experience (UX) Design is a fundamental tool in a great developer's toolkit.

Imagine that you've just sent a tweet. You wrote some text on your phone, hit a button, and 'magically' hundreds, thousands, or millions of users around the world can see that message on their phones. That 'magic' is what back-end systems do. In this talk we will discuss some of the components, design considerations, and tools we use to build these types of systems.

You’re graduating school and about to start your career in technology. What happens next? In this talk, I’ll share the things I wish I knew about making the transition from the classroom to the workplace. We’ll discuss some of the issues you may face and some actions you can take to make the switch and maximize your career potential.

Let's discuss Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Topics include the mix reality spectrum, augmented reality platforms, such as Vuforia and Apple's ARKit, and virtual reality headsets. Tune in for real-world applications, VR games, and all around fun.

The divide between design and development can be vast. Designers lob something over the wall for development without knowledge or perspective of technical limitations, and developers are left to sort out requirements and edge cases. No one is satisfied when designers' visions aren't implemented or developers are expected to explain why something can't be built. It doesn't have to be this way. This talk will introduce solutions you can implement on your team to bridge the divide and do your best work. Using an internal project at Rackspace as a case study, Glynnis will talk about why upfront planning, identifying the problem before agreeing on a solution, and cross-disciplinary collaboration are crucial to successful projects.

Functional programming, concurrency, and fault tolerance helped scale apps like WhatsApp, Bleacher Report and others to millions of users with a small team on minimal hardware. Find out how Elixir, a relatively new language with a modern syntax, can help you build highly-performant, planet-scale web apps by leveraging over thirty years of proven, battle-tested technology.

Help! My app bundle is 5MB! My users are angry that my app is so slow! It’s easy to forget that performance matters when we are under pressure to deliver features quickly. What things should we always do versus only do when performance is slow? What data should we use to inform our decisions? From code splitting, lazy loading, and tree shaking to image optimization and store architecture, come learn how you can deliver a better experience to your users with high-performing front-end apps. This talk uses Webpack and ES6 but is library-agnostic (React, Angular, Vue, etc.).