October SeattleJS Meetup at RealSelf

It's the 2nd Thursday of the month, time to hang out with your fellow web developers!

Stick around after the main event for social hour at Flatstick Pub! (240 2nd Ave S)

We've got a great lineup this month:

TALK ONE
Speaker: Josh Goldberg
Title: Internet Explorer is a Wonderful Browser and an Absolute Pleasure to Work With
Description: (just kidding, it's terrible)

In an era dominated by evergreen browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, it's easy as web developers to assume our users are all on modern platforms. Unfortunately, there are quite a few users stuck with IE for reasons out of their control, such as underfunded school districts without the IT resources to migrate or businesses with legacy IE ActiveX plugins.

After complaining about the prevalence of outdated systems, this talk will go over several strategies for dealing with IE issues. In summary:

Wrap everything in a try/catch
Log things
Don't modify globals
Stress test
Sometimes give up
Enjoy the challenge
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshuaKGoldberg
Github: https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg
Website: https://joshuakgoldberg.com/

TALK TWO
Speaker: Kelsey Breseman
Title: Firmware 101: How to Talk to Hardware in Javascript (and have it talk back!)
Description: We know that programming comes down to ones and zeroes in the hardware. But how does that translation from human-readable code to electronics actually occur? How do we take an inert off-the-shelf sensor and program it to wake up and produce useful information? As a JavaScript programmer, how do you take the leap from web into working with sensors and interfacing with the physical world through code?

In this 25-minute talk, Kelsey introduces hardware communication as a how-­to-walkthrough from digital signals up to a practical application. In a hands-on demonstration, Kelsey connects a Tessel microcontroller and an accelerometer, decodes their interaction with a logic analyzer, and combs through a datasheet to show the groundwork a firmware engineer does to start two devices talking to each other– all in JavaScript.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ifoundtheme
Github: https://github.com/frijol
Website: http://ifoundthemeaningoflife.com/

TALK THREE
Speaker: Joe Burges
Title: Virtual Reality in JavaScript with Aframe.io
Description: With the expansion of cheaper and cheaper virtual reality hardware such as the Oculus Go and Google Cardboard, consuming Virtual Reality experiences has become accessible. Thankfully, JavaScript has increased the accessibility of creating these VR experiences. With the AFrame.io library, JavaScript can know create interactive 3D Virtual Reality experiences with as much eas as basic DOM manipulation.

In this talk, Joe will show the basics of creating objects in AFrame and using existing DOM manipulation skills to manipulate those objects. Additionally, we'll cover how to interact with objects and apply some physics to your new virtual space. This is only a primer on all that Aframe.io can do, but will give students the initial skills to run towards even better virtual worlds.

Submit a talk for future meetups:
https://github.com/seattlejs/seattlejs/blob/master/request-to-speak.md