May: Reactive Programming / Web Workers for Smoother UX

Our May meetup is planned for the 8th of May at Skills Matter CodeNode. Please remember to also register at the Skills Matter website (https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/10689-london-halfstack-may ).

Agenda:

18:00: Meet and greet

18:30: Welcome to HalfStack & JS News

18:40: The Past, Present and Future of Reactive Programming, by Jason Green

19:10: Exploring Web Workers for Smoother UX, by James Milner

20:00: Pub

About the speakers:

Jason Green

Jason is a Principal Developer at the Mail Online and the Team Lead of the bespoke CMS that powers one of the biggest online newspapers in the world. Jason loves to create and build things. Jason's passion for the digital world has taken him across the entire spectrum of the creative process, from conceptualisation to development and continuous engagement with the product’s life-cycle.

James Milner

James is a fullstack software developer with a history of building immersive web applications within the startup and geospatial sectors. He is a fan of all things web development, particularly frontend with a penchant for exploring the potentials of the platform. During working life he spends time mulling over performance and user experience patterns.

About the talks:

The Past, Present and Future of Reactive Programming

This will be a journey through the evolution of both the definition and implementations of Reactive Programming and how they have been converging in a quest to make building responsive applications a sane process. We are still at the point where there is no complete consensus on what a reactive application is; we will explore how this consensus is evolving and what problems it brings. We are going to talk about the past, present and possible futures of reactive programming and how you can survive it all.

Exploring Web Workers for Smoother UX

Web browsers use single threaded JavaScript to perform tasks; business logic, layout, reflows, and garbage collection. This means complex and heavy JavaScript functions can block the main thread from rendering. This results in low frame rates and low interactivity for things like scrolling and input, providing a poor user experience. In this talk we explore the idea of using Web Workers to free the main thread for rendering for performant and smooth web applications.

Conferences

Don't forget to get your early bird tickets for HalfStack, our one-day UI-centric JS conf in a pub, back again this year on the 16th of November. http://halfstackconf.com/