July SFNode Meetup

SFNode is coming to Instacart for our July event! Starting off the night is our very own Dan Shaw (@dshaw) giving some perspective on the Node.js Ecosystem. Then Tre' will let us know what some of his favorite NPM modules are. Closing out the night will be Sebastiaan Deckers discussing http/2.

We meet on the 1st Thursday of the month. Every meetup, we try to have a mix of beginner and advanced talks.

Please note that the attendees need to bring their ID to pass security.

Schedule

6:30pm - Doors Open
7:00pm - The Node.js Ecosystem in Perspective - Dan Shaw
7:30pm - My Top NPM Modules (Lighting Talk) - Tre' Grisby
7:45pm - The Promise of HTTP/2 Push - Sebastiaan Deckers
8:00pm - Open Mic and Social time
9:00pm - Doors close

The Node.js Ecosystem in Perspective

Node.js was created 7 years ago by Ryan Dahl to increase the performance of web application development. Node.js was born in the era of GitHub which led the project's phenomenal contribution story. It has superseded jQuery as the most important JavaScript project ever. Node.js is far from being the first server-side JavaScript platform, but nothing prior has had anywhere close to the impact it has. Node.js is rapidly transforming application development from an environment dominated by Java to one dominated by JavaScript.

Many novel choices were made along the way. Node.js ships with "batteries included". Node.js was built with a very liberal license. Node.js has no standard library and encourages userland experimentation. Node.js chose to standardize on a single package management solution with npm. Node.js is fully cross-platform. Node.js applications run everywhere (take that Java!). All of this comes together to create an extraordinary ecosystem.

Dan Shaw will explore the implications of these decisions and how they have impacted the Node.js Ecosystem. 7 years on, Node.js is everywhere with a massive user base and the largest package registry ever. And yet, there's still so much to do.

About Dan Shaw

Dan Shaw (dshaw) is Co-Founder and CTO of NodeSource, the Enterprise Node Company, and is dedicated to helping improve and grow the Node Community. He is a veteran of numerous Node.js startups including Voxer, Spreecast and Storify. Dan has extensive experience building large-scale, realtime systems with Node.js and has been building production services using Node since v0.2. Dan is a frequent speaker, host of the NodeUp podcast and organizer of events like EnterpriseJS and the SFNode meetup. Prior to Node, Dan worked in large-scale government contracts for Defense, Health Care and Education.

My Top NPM Modules (Lighting Talk)

This presentation features the NPM Modules I use for projects. NPM is a great way to save time by not re-inventing the wheel. NPM modules cover encryption, make server side logging easily accessible, and web frameworks save you time. By the end of this lightning talk, you will have a better sense of modules that can really boost your development time by saving you tons of steps.

Have you dealt with Dev-Dependencies? Let’s talk about it…

About Tre' Grisby

I am a software developer who originally worked with Microsoft technologies and is now looking at JavaScript frameworks. As a consultant, I help companies interface with their enterprise billing systems. I love talking with other developers about coding. Currently, I work at BART in the IT department.

My passion for Tabletop RPG Conventions has driven me to bring this type of gaming to the broader online community. Between 2013 and 2015, I organized a series of online conventions. You can view my June 2013 "L.U.G. Con Lemonade" panel here (https://youtu.be/Hh0ccTgwPXk?list=PLdEqgqlskQs5ceo3qDTs0j4vWzUsVnfuZ). Currently I am creating an app called “Game Covenant 2” ( http://gc2-alpha.herokuapp.com/#/login ) to help conventions schedule more games and make revenue online.

@trewaters
https://www.linkedin.com/in/trewaters
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TreGrisby/posts
https://github.com/Trewaters

The Promise of HTTP/2 Push

Optimising asset delivery over HTTP/1.1 necessitated hacky "best practices" that are obsoleted by the design of HTTP/2. Features like stream multiplexing and header compression are easy to deploy, free wins. But HTTP/2 Push requires a rethink of some old habits. No more sprites, no more concatenating, no more icon fonts.

Let's take a look at HTTP/2 Push and see if it delivers on its promises (pun intended). The holy grail is to serve an entire app, thousands of files, using a single request. How much of a performance difference does it make? Which problems are solved, which challenges introduced? How does it impact frontend tools, backend API design, CDNs, etc?

This presentation is a brief glimpse of the future with HTTP/2 Push. I intend to demonstrate my experimental proof-of-concept implementation (https://gitlab.com/sebdeckers/http2server) (based on node-http2). I have a demo project (https://gitlab.com/sebdeckers/push-demo) to highlight the tooling and performance impact. It is not a code-along though I may decide to do some live demos. All content and source code is, and will be, open source (ISC license or similar).

About Sebastiaan Deckers

I am Sebastiaan Deckers (@cbas (https://github.com/cbas)/ @sebdeckers (https://gitlab.com/sebdeckers) 🐺), a web developer based in Singapore 🐔🍚, originally from Belgium 🍫🍻. I'm in the Bay Area for a month of nomadic work and adventure. I freelance with startups mainly as a frontend engineer. I love enabling teams with tool-building and stack-tinkering, perhaps more than anyone reasonably should enjoy such things. Sometimes I dabble in a bit of Node.js backend/API hacking.

I co-organise meetups like Front End TL;DR (http://feds.strikingly.com/), co-host NodeSchool workshops (http://2016.fossasia.org/schedule/#WT-12), and recently I taught Singapore's first immersive web development course at General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly/instructors/sebastiaan-deckers/6135).