Monthly Meetup

Schedule:

7:00-7:15 General discussion/Meet & Greet/Food/Drinks
7:15-7:25 Lightning Talks
7:25-7:30 Community Updates
7:35-8:00 Unbraiding JavaScript (http://slides.com/jesseharlin/unbraiding-javascript) - Jesse Harlin
8:00-? Open Discussion

Talk Description:

The enemy. Knowing it is in your project keeps you up at night. You can feel the technical debt accumulating. There are files in your code base developers are afraid to modify. Training programmers on a new project is taking longer than it should. You feel like you are bailing water out of a boat during a rainstorm. What is this force of destruction that grows like blight in your source? Complexity!

Complexity is the enemy.

This talk is two-fold: Seek and Destroy.

Seek:
What tooling and practices can help me find complexity? Where does it gather? What are things like SLOC, Halstead Complexity, and Linting? What are some sure signs a file is going to blow up and no longer be maintainable? Working in your project needs to feel like coding with X-ray vision.

Destroy:
Once you find the complexity, you gotta do something about it. We will discuss techniques and promote more simple modular systems. This is both in the form of project organization, as well as some useful design patterns. We will look at ways to refactor code into simplicity by avoiding code gestures that, objectively speaking, increase the complexity of a code base.

About our Speaker: Jesse Harlin Jesse loves JavaScript, algorithmic music composition, and Amanda. He is the R&D department and client-side architect at Telogical. He co-founded OKC.js, ThunderPlains, and the Techlahoma Foundation.
Jesse’s website (http://jesseharlin.net/)

Parking and Directions

The Geekdom Event Centre is at 131 Soledad Street (https://www.google.com/maps/place/131+Soledad+St,+San+Antonio,+TX+78205), which is just behind the main entrance to the Rand Building where the rest of Geekdom is located. It's right in the middle of the Rand Garage.

For parking, there's a paid lot across Houston Street (between Main and Soledad) and a city metered lot (free after 6pm) a couple blocks to the north at 403 N Flores (https://www.google.com/maps/place/403+N+Flores+St,+San+Antonio,+TX+78205/). Parking is also free after 6pm for any street city public parking spot.

Submit a Talk

We're always looking for speakers to present on anything they're passionate about. Submit a proposal (http://goo.gl/forms/js2Y0LYMhj) and we'll fit you in for one of our upcoming meetups.