An Introduction to WebAssembly with Guy Royse

Lightning talk: Serverless Up and Running with Jim Hall

Abstract
We’ll be doing a crash course on Serverless Framework with NodeJS and AWS. We will set up a basic REST api on the cloud in just a few minutes.

Serverless is a command-line tool for building and deploying cloud applications. It makes setting up infrastructure easy and works with AWS, Google Cloud, MS Azure and others.

About Jim Hall
Jim is a principal software engineer and manager at Trove here in Ann Arbor with over 10 years of experience in software. He has been working with Serverless and AWS for his personal tracking app, Brooklet. Jim is interested in tools which lead to maintainable, readable, and production-ready code. When not coding, Jim can be found playing board games, doing home improvement projects, and learning new things, all to procrastinate doing his laundry.

Featured Talk: An Introduction to WebAssembly with Guy Royse

Organizer note:
This talk might seem a bit odd for a JavaScript users group, since it's all about _not_ writing JavaScript. But like it or not, WebAssembly is coming, and learning what it is and how it's used will make us better web developers, and possibly add another tool to our belts.

Abstract:
Want to write a web application? Better get familiar with JavaScript! JavaScript has long been the king of front-end. While there have been various attempts to dethrone it, they have typically involved treating JavaScript as an assembly-language analog that you transpile your code to. This has lead to complex build pipelines that result in JavaScript which the browser has to parse and you still have to debug. But what if there were an actual byte-code language you could compile your non-JavaScript code to instead? That is what WebAssembly is.

Guy is going to explain how WebAssembly works and how to use it in this talk. He'll cover what it is, how it fits into your application, and how to build and use your own WebAssembly modules. And, he'll demo how to build and use those modules with both Rust and the WebAssembly Text Format. That's right, he'll be live coding in an assembly language. He will also go over some online resources for other languages and tools that make use of WebAssembly.

When we're done, you'll have the footing you need to start building applications featuring WebAssembly. So grab a non-JavaScript language, a modern browser, and let's and get started!

Bio:
Guy works for DataRobot in Columbus, Ohio as a Developer Evangelist. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software.

Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He is President of the Columbus JavaScript Users Group, an organizer for the Columbus Machine Learners, and has even has helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.

In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. In his spare time, he volunteers for his local Cub Scout Pack, goes camping, and studies history and linguistics.

Guy lives in Ohio with his wife, his three teenage sons, and an entire wall of games.

Food Sponsor: Pillar