LeedsTechHub: Microservices, WebHooks, ES6 JS and MVC abundance.

July 23rd’s meetup is a web development themed one. We’re lucky to have four brilliant speakers from Heroku, GoCardless, Twilio and Sky presenting.
As usual we'll lay on some free booze and grub too!

Talks:

Ruby microservices at Heroku – Andrew Appleton, Heroku Let's take a look at Heroku's internal tooling for quickly building API microservices. We maintain a Sinatra based framework which provides a set of defaults to get up and running quickly. We'll talk about JSON Schema and the automated tooling which can be built on top of JSON Schemas e.g. data validation, auto-generated API docs, auto-generated API clients. We'll also talk about the conventions which we follow within our apps, specifically the mediator pattern which we've found to be extremely useful in managing the complexity of interactions between different models or services. Finally we'll look at how we use a set of Heroku deployment features to make reviewing and deploying these apps really easy.

The JavaScript workflow of 2015 – Jack Franklin, GoCardless
In this talk I'll demonstrate how it is possible to architect and write complex client side JavaScript applications in ECMAScript 6 today, despite a lack of implementations across browsers. We'll explore how we can use libraries like SystemJS and Babel to allow us to seamlessly write code in ES6 and consume 3rd party libraries, regardless of the format they are written in. We'll then architect the application as a series of modules using the new ES6 module syntax, and write using new ES6 features like constants, arrow functions, classes and more. Using jspm [jspm.io] as our build tool, we'll see how to quickly and easily install libraries from npm and GitHub, and have them work out of the box in the browser. We'll look at the developer workflow and how jspm also makes it trivial to bundle our application up in production.

All things new and shiny! – Richard McIntyre, Sky
As developers we are lucky to live in a time where there is an abundance of exciting technologies. But with a new JavaScript framework appearing seemingly every week, we can't possible learn them all and deciding what technologies to invest our time into can be overwhelming.
Richard will share with us about how to create a technology radar. Rather than reactively choose the hippest thing out there, why not strategically see your technology choices work for you, your team and organisation.

WebHooks: The API Strikes Back - Phil Nash, Twilio
These days many APIs are more than just simple REST services. Through WebHooks, APIs are talking back, giving us more information and prompting further action from our applications. But what is the best way to react to these demanding APIs?
We'll look at some services that use Webhooks, exploring reasons to use WebHooks and the emerging best practices. Then we'll look at the other side, implementing WebHook endpoints. Does consuming WebHooks make our application an API? What are the easiest ways to develop and test with WebHooks? We'll cover security, performance and standards all wrapped up with some live coded examples.
By the end we'll know how to handle anything an API can throw back at us.

This group was established by some of the lovely folk at Sky in Leeds.
Curious about what we do here in Leeds? http://www.workforsky.com/behind-the-scenes/changing-game/sky-tech-leeds-offers-exciting-opportunities

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS NOT OPEN TO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES - FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT SOPHIE EARNSHAW VIA THE LINKS BELOW.

Biographies

Phil Nash is a developer evangelist for Twilio serving developer communities in London and all over Europe. He is a lover of all things front end, a Ruby developer and, more recently, an amateur brewer. APIs old and new, browsers and REST, fuel his passion for development. You should have seen how delighted he was the first time he played with the WebAudio API!
Phil loves test coverage, great beer, hackathons, and libraries with puns in their names. Get all four together for maximum points.

Jack Franklin is a developer, speaker and author who blogs at javascriptplayground.com and has authored "Beginning jQuery". Jack works as an engineer at GoCardless and is also a Google Developer Expert for the Chrome HTML 5 platform. He tweets as @jack_franklin and spends far too much time thinking about JavaScript.

Hi! I'm Andy Appleton and I am a developer at Heroku. I'm lucky to work on a team responsible for building cool new features for the developers who use our platform. That means I get to work at different levels of the stack depending on what needs to be done. I mostly work with Ruby and JavaScript. We use Ember on the client and a mixture of Node.js and Sinatra on the server and it's really cool to be able to jump between them.

Richard McIntyre is an agile testing coach and somewhat of a polyglot programmer. He has a particular liking for Ruby and JavaScript. Currently part of the exciting move of Sky Technology to Leeds, he was previously working as a freelancer in Japan for many years, before being involved in delivering projects for the likes of iPlayer, BBC Sport and William Hill.