Open Components & Reactive Chat

Hey everybody!

Come join us at OpenTable and meet some talented engineers. We'll be sharing our technological solutions utilizing Node.js, Javascript, React.js, Highland.js.

We'll start with Max Gurewitz, who will walkthrough writing a chat application using reactive streams.

Afterwards we'll hear from Matteo Figus about Open Components, a framework for distributing and developing solutions for the web.

Food and drinks will be served :)

More Details:

Max:

Managing state in an event driven client side app can quickly become overwhelmingly complex. Learn to simplify your designs with functional reactive programming.

During this talk I’ll walk you through building a chat application with socket.io, highland.js, and react.js. This exercise will provide an introduction to using streams for asynchronous control flow.

https://github.com/maxgurewitz/

Matteo:

Writing front-end code today is very challenging when you have to be resilient and robust in a big corporation. Working on a website that involves dozens of engineers based in three different continents, I learned that the complexity lies not only within the code itself. Allowing people to develop new features and deploy the code multiple times a day, keeping it up and running, is hard to achieve: we want small teams to be independent and not to interfere each other, in order to be quick and happy, but we also want to optimise cooperation when it is needed.

During this talk I’m going to speak about how we tried to approach to components at OpenTable. After breaking our monolithic back-end into smaller parts, we tried to break the front-end into smaller parts too, called micro-sites. Then, following the SOA principles, we tried to elevate components as services, in order to make engineers able to create and consume them via clear and well-defined contracts and interfaces. This allowed us to put in place the infrastructure to optimise testing and to have hundreds of changes live every day without conflicts. The result is OpenComponents, a framework that we recently open-sourced.

https://github.com/matteofigus

David:

David 'DC' Collier is founder of Rikai.co, a startup making educational chat games.

He previously lived in japan for 10 years making mobile games.

Today I'll demo ComicEnglish which is a chat game for learning languages. Players talk to in-game "bots". We've developed a GUI layer on top of text chat so interactive widgets like choice dialogs, quizzes and other mini-games all appear in the chat stream, showing what a next-gen rich chat UI can be. I'll also show how the chat parser, basic NLP and fallback to human operator for 1:n chats data flow works together (time permitting).