Lightning Talks

6 pm : Lightning Talks

7 pm: Dinner and Networking

7:30 pm: MORE Lightning Talks

It's that time of the season -- the time for you give a quick 10 minute talk on the COOLEST TOPIC EVER! You know, that one you've been waiting to see up on stage. After last month's topics "Tech Presentation Bootcamp" and "HTML5 Slidemaking 101", you'll be ready to give your newfound skills a try.

To start your inevitable rise to Lightning Talk Fame, just send me your talk title and a quick paragraph describing what you plan to cover -- scott@thirstyhead.com

Did you stumble across a cool new JavaScript framework that you're dying to brag about? How about a new CSS3 technique that will blow the audience away? You might've even stumbled across a little-known HTML5 element that was the perfect solution to a nagging problem.

Lightning talks are 10 minutes long, and meant to be a low-stress way to get up on stage and polish up those presentation skills of yours. Talk about what you're doing at work. Talk about what you're doing at night to keep you sane at work. Talk about what you wish you could be working on in a perfect world. We can hardly wait to hear what you've got to say!

"HTML5 Drag and Drop" by Nathan Lipke

HTML5 has finally standardized Drag and Drop. You no longer need to rely on jQuery. Html5 Drag and Drop supports dragging and dropping on a single page, between windows (regardless of origin) and even other applications (such as the desktop, other browsers and native applications). I’ll also discuss the security aspects of allowing drag and drop in your application.

"HTML5 Local and Session Storage with JSON" by Tom Marrs

In this talk we'll cover: The basics of HTML5 Local & Session Storage; How to serialize/de-serialize JavaScript Objects using JSON; How HTML5 Web Storage fits into Mobile App design/development.

"PhET Interactive Simulations in HTML5" by Sam Reid

http://phet.colorado.edu (http://phet.colorado.edu/)
PhET Interactive Simulations at the University of Colorado Boulder publishes free, open-source educational simulations. We have published 12 single-page web apps which are currently viewed over 150,000 times per month. In this lightning talk, I will demonstrate key elements of our framework, including UI, model patterns, animation, cross-platform support and public API for third-party software integration.

"The Story of JavaScript Systems" by Clint Nash

The history of JS reads like an Hollywood adventure. We were entertained by Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0), survived the Browser Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars), experienced a “Cambrian Explosion” (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024088.do), and defeated the first wave of Zombie Apocalypse (http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/the-coming-zombie-apocalypse-small-cheap-devices-will-disrupt-our-old-school-ux-assumptions.htm). All while we now encounter an Internet of Things (http://econsultancy.com/blog/64211-the-internet-of-things-five-new-products-changing-the-market-now?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_campaign=3609138_1080-daily-pulse-uk-2014-01-30&dm_i=LQI,25CTU,9O2YZH,7REVB,1) and something known as The Web Platform (http://fluentconf.com/fluent2014). These are exciting times to be sure, but in javascript-land this trilogy continues…

Come see the rapid advancement of JS described in an interactive D3 visualization, and learn the story of JavaScript Systems.

"More Than One Way To Skin A Form or How to Enrich a Google Form" by Greg Ostravich

What if I told you that you could combine the tastiness of a Google Form with the rich chewy goodness of a JQuery Validator plug-in? Well you can!

In this talk you’ll see how you can easily take a Google Form (think Survey Monkey ™ ) and strip out the interface which is nice, but does not have a rich set of data validations. Then JavaScript can be used to validate data and prevent submission until the form is complete.

"Backbone to Angular: A Road Traveled" by Scott Ryan

We recently converted a couple of apps from BackboneJS to AngularJS. We learned a lot from taking a small app to a very large app and would love to share our experiences with the group.

"Best Practices Writing jQuery Plugins" by Jason Hummel

jQuery plugins are ubiquitous. They're like the legos of the web - you snap together these simple pieces of functionality to create complex interactions with a minimal amount of custom code. Apart from some very simple boilerplate, these plugins can be created in a variety of fashions. This talk will attempt to showcase some easy best practices to keep in mind when creating your own plugin including AMD support, API visibility and extensibility.

"SASS 101" by Rona Kilmer

If you are not using a CSS preprocessor, you should be. Learn how to get started with SASS and streamline your CSS workflow. We'll talk about variables and mixins, how to extend styles you've already written and wrangle in those large hard to maintain CSS files.

"Atomic Styleguide Driven Development: The Death of Pixel Perfect" by Jake Gibbons

Responsive is going from buzz word to reality for many projects. The days of whole page static comps being lobbed at front-end devs with no thought of how the elements interact outside each PSD can't survive this reality. To fight back Brad Frost, among others, are leading the charge to bring modularity to style systems where we once only had pages. Frost compels us to break our design elements into Atoms, which build Molecules, that can be used to construct Organisms, which are the various modules of pages/templates. Management of these modules requires new tooling, like PatternLab, that can be used to quickly navigate, resize, and compare individual Atoms and more expansive Organisms alike.

I can't teach you responsive UI dev in 10 minutes, but I can show you the tools I used to make it easier and more reliable. In my talk, I'll briefly share my experiences developing responsive sites. Then I'll walkthrough of a simple PatternLab driven UI development cycle.

"Be Your Own Product Owner" by Stuart Phillips

Product owners should be employed to make informed decisions about road maps and enhancements. Great product owners can improve the product with little effort or cost using a repeatable methodology. In software development, often the developer and their skills are the product. I will cover why you should act as your own product owner, the product owner mindset, the types of customers you have, the questions to ask them, and how to act on that feedback to help improve your product (you) and your professional life.

"Improving Load Times with CDNs" by Tom Byrer

Want to save some money on hosting? Help prevent traffic spikes from grinding your website to a halt? While delivering assets faster to users' browsers & apps worldwide? Then you need a Content Delivery Network (CDN)! Find out how a few simple URL or configuration changes can give your website a nitrous boost.