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

6:00pm: Arrive and Network!
6:10pm: A word from our sponsors
6:20pm: Community announcements
6:30pm: Talk one!
7:00pm: Talk two!
7:30pm: Talk three!
8:00pm: End of program.

TALK ONE

Make Testing Fun Again with Cypress
By Mike Cataldo

Writing end-to-end tests is a chore. Maintaining them is a nightmare. Cypress is replacing Selenium as the de facto standard. If you want to make writing tests fun again, then this talk is for you. I'll introduce you to Cypress and show you why you should use it to ship front-end code more confidently.

Mike has been using Cypress exclusively since it came out of beta several years ago. As community interest has grown over the last few years, He has been promoting Cypress by giving talks and hosting workshops in his home state of Utah. The Cypress team recently recognized him as a distinguished contributor to the community by accepting him into their Cypress Ambassador Program. His goal for 2021 is to extend his community outreach. He just launched a new site and YouTube channel, iheartjs, where he currently hosting his workshop material but will be publishing more content in the coming months.

TALK TWO

Sharing (Typescript) Types Across the Stack
By Evan Tahler

When you dive into the Typescript deep end, you'll hopefully start to see the benefits of using complex types across all parts of your application. You can can check that the controller is accessing a model property that really does exist, and you can use union types to make sure your API responses are always valid.

But, what if we could share our Types even further... what if we could share them with our frontend? In this way, we could automatically be confident that the properties we were trying to display on our site really do come back with our API responses... we could know for certain if dates are returned as strings or timestamps... and more!

In this talk, I'll share how we do that at @grouparoo between an @actionhero backend and @reactjs frontend and some generally applicable concepts to you can too!

Evan Tahler is the CTO and co-founder of @grouparoo, a new company building tools that make it easy to sync and use your product data everywhere.

Prior to that, he was the Chief Product Officer at Voom (an Airbus Company) providing urban air mobility to cities around the world. Evan's expertise lies in building the technical side of digital products, as well as growing the teams required to do so. He’s helped companies like Disney, TaskRabbit, ModCloth, and Airbus launch new global digital initiatives. He is named on a number of patents focusing on mobile interactions and digital entertainment. Evan is an open-source innovator, and frequent speaker at software development conferences focusing on Product Management, Node.JS, Rails, and databases.

TALK THREE

Tech Twitch and You
By Chris Griffing

There is a Science and Technology section of Twitch that you might not know about. You can find streamers just starting out on their coding journey. You can find seasoned developers that write code for major companies, open-source enthusiasts, and fun communities with which to talk about tech. There are even official streams from large companies like AWS, Microsoft, and MongoDB. He would like to highlight a few of those streams for you to get you started into the wide world of Tech Twitch. (I stream and will mention in passing but the focus is on other streamers.)

Chris loves hanging out in the Science and Tech community and he stream a little bit myself. He also a somewhat Senior Web Developer at Symetra and have previously done work for a number of companies through a previous agency. He also enjoy long walks in the snow and smooth synthwave.