Lightning Talks!

6 pm : Lightning Talks

7 pm: Dinner and Networking

7:30 pm: MORE Lightning Talks

The HTML5 Denver User Group is 5 years old this year, and the annual Lightning Talks meeting continues to be one of our most popular nights. It's like "technology dim sum" -- tasty little bite-sized presentations given by YOU!

Lightning talks are 10 minutes long, and meant to be a low-stress way to get up on stage and polish up those presentation skills of yours. Talk about what you're doing at work. Talk about what you're doing at night to keep you sane at work. Talk about what you wish you could be working on in a perfect world. We can hardly wait to hear what you've got to say!

If there's a cool new Javascript library out there that you love, here's your chance to tell us about it. If you're using a hot new CSS3 technique, here's your chance to enlighten us. If there's a new HTML5 element that we should be using, here's your chance to show us how you're using it in your application.

To start your inevitable rise to Lightning Talk Fame and Fortune, just send your talk title and a quick paragraph describing what you plan to cover to me -- scott at thirstyhead dot com (scott@thirstyhead.com).

"Introduction to ProtractorJS" by Peter Hendrick

Using unit tests is a great way to develop your app. The issue with unit testing is many times you must mock the server side code, and test only the client side. Or you mock the client side code and test only the server side code. With angular applications there is Protractor to tie it all together and get true End2End testing of your app, both server and client side code together. This is important because this is the only true way to test your app the way the end user will be using it.

Protractor is an open source application designed by the angular team and can be found at https://github.com/angular/protractor. Protractor uses the selenium web driver and the jasmine framework to manipulate elements inside of a browser in order to test the app the way a user would interact with the app. I will be giving a brief, 10 minute introduction on Protractor and how to use it to get End2End testing of your angular apps.

"PhET Interactive Simulations: Accessibility and Interoperability" by Sam Reid

PhET Interactive Simulations ( http://phet.colorado.edu/ ) at the University of Colorado Boulder publishes free, open source educational HTML5 simulations for students in math & science. Our simulations are game-like and we use canvas, SVG and WebGL for high quality and high performance rendering. However, as for many HTML5 games, this creates a barrier to accessibility for both keyboard navigation and screen reader support. We are investigating several strategies for making the simulations accessible while maintaining high performance on mobile devices. In other work, we are developing an API for flexible 3rd party interoperability to enable teachers, researchers and content providers to control the state of the simulation and receive data about how the simulation is being used for assessments. More information is available at https://github.com/phetsims/together/tree/gh-pages

"Going Native with asm.js" by Daniel Langdon

Jeff Atwood said that "Anything that can be written in Javascript will be written in Javascript." That quote sounds apt in today's world where everything seems to be going to the browser, but consider the elephant in the room: Javascript is an interpretted, dynamic language that was never intended to be used for applications that require immense raw processing power.

There are several projects out there to bring native code to the web, and asm.js is one of them. The Mozilla team implemented asm.js in an attempt to make possible high-performance applications in the browser.

How does it work? Simple: asm.js consists of a C-like procedural language embedded in Javascript. The beauty of that is that it is all standardized Javascript, so there is no need to worry about backwards compatibility. When a browser that supports asm.js sees this code, it compiles it.

"What is Webpack?" by Dennis Johnson

There are many great build systems available for bundling Javascript applications. One of which is Webpack. Webpack is a bundler that allows you to compose your application in terms of modules. It provides a rich and customizable build configuration for packaging your application's JS, CSS, etc. Webpack also provides a ton of really great tooling and plugins. In this talk, I will be giving an overview of the features that Webpack offers including bundling CommonJS modules, transpiling code written in ES6, hot module replacement and the dev server, and a few others.

"The State of HTML5 Video" by Geoff Filippi

Video is the dominant application responsible for data use on the Internet. Until recently, proprietary stacks (Flash, Silverlight, etc.) have been the only viable choice for premium video providers. (Video that costs money.) However, recent developments in HTML5 video beginning to change that.

This talk will discuss the latest developments in the HTML5 video ecosystem. We will touch on the remaining issues that need to be solved to make HTML5 viable for premium video. We will also talk about how to use HTML5 video now, and how to polyfill or fall back on browsers that do not support the latest technology.

"Improving Load Times with CDNs" by Tom Byrer

Want to save some money on hosting? Help prevent traffic spikes from grinding your website to a halt? While delivering assets faster to users' browsers & apps worldwide? Then you need a Content Delivery Network (CDN)! Find out how a few simple URL or configuration changes can give your website a nitrous boost.

"Everything you wanted to know about Docker in 10 minutes" by Scott Fredericksen

Docker is being talked about a lot in the IT industry, but what does it really buy us? If we are adding yet another layer in our development, test, or deployments, how does it help? What problem is it solving? In this presentation, I'll provide a quick overview of Docker versus some of the other technologies such as VirtualBox, Vagrant, Heroku, VMware, etc. I'll also give a quick survey of PaaS providers that allow you to deploy and host containers. All of this is with an end goal of trying to be able to answer the question of for this extra effort, what does it buy us. If I have any time left, I'll try to introduce what the typical workflow would look like for a new developer coming onto a project and getting set up with Docker (on Ubuntu Linux).

"Raspberry Pi + Open Source = AirPlay Goodness (for $45)" by Anthony Kilhoffer

The Raspberry Pi movement has exploded over the past few years, so it’s no wonder this evolution has occurred. With the help of a few open source projects, any Raspberry Pi can be turned into an AirPlay receiver you can connect to from your iDevice.

We’ll start with a very quick intro to what the Raspberry Pi is and where it came from, then talk about how to prep it for AirPlay. There are tons of resources out there on how to accomplish this, but finding some of the nuances, such as tweaking the output volume of Raspberry Pi to the maximum without clipping, can be an explorative process. I’ve taken the time to find these answers so you won’t have to!

"1, 2, 3 SVG!" by Andy Ennamorato

We'll cover the basics of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - what they are, why and how you might want to use them in your web application and a few good tools and libraries when doing so. Your graphics and web applications will thank you for making them as animatable, resizeable, shiny and fun as ever.