Trondheim Frontend Best of Conference 2017
Once again we’ve collected great talks to watch in an evening we like to call Best of Conference. In this post we list four great talks that one can watch together or by yourself. We’ve also summerized our thoughts and reflections for each video for you to prioritize.
Skrevet av Torgeir Thoresen, Mikael Brevik, Kjetil Golid og Mats Jørgensen
For the second time now, a special interest group in BEKK Trondheim has organized internally what we call a “Best of Conference”. We do a call for proposals where we collectively send in all the best talks we’ve seen and have a program committee go through all and select their favourites. This is our talk line-up. On an evening we meetup, eat some food and enjoy high quality presentations and discuss and reflect around what we see.
Last time we did this, we covered talks like Rich Hickey’s Simplicity Matters, Mike Monteiro’s How Designers Destroyed the World, David Nolen’s Putting The Dream Machine To Work and Philip Roberts’ What the heck is the event loop anyway?. All great talks, by everyones standard. So we where excited to do this again.
This time we’ve selected also four videos, but with a focus on functional programming, short and visual feedback loops and architectural principles. Recommended to watch in a group and discuss afterwords. We also recommend to watch it in the order that is presented in this post.
Making Impossible States Impossible — Richard Feldman
A great talk by Richard Feldman from elm-conf 2016 on “Making Impossible States Impossible”. Richard shows how features of the Elm type system can assist in designing your data model in such a way that states illegal to your application are not representable in code. He also goes on to show how single-constructor union types and Elm’s imports can help prevent implementation details from leaking out into depending code.
The ideas from this talk are well articulated and applies to most programmers’ daily work, not just the ones using Elm. By spending slightly more time thinking about how you model your application’s domain, you will spend far less time scratching your head to handle wierd edge cases in code that are not even possible in the domain you are attempting to model. Along with Elm’s exhaustive pattern matching facilities, such an approach is a perfect fit, and will likely not only improve your data model but well even make your apis clearer!
- Summary written by Torgeir Thoresen
Inventing on principle — Bret Victor
Every now and then these timeless types of talks appear — that you can watch over and over again, and still be blown away, years after their creation! At cusec in 2012, Bret Victor delivers this kind of a talk, describing how a principle he lives by leads his life: the principle of immediate feedback. It shapes the way he works and thinks, and this talk shows us how it affects his ideas and creations. He discusses how limitations of current tools hinder great ideas from coming to life, and continues to show how the effect of immediate feedback radically improves his creativity and the exploratory process for new ideas.
Many of the examples shown in this talk paved the way in the years that followed, for new features of creative tools and text editors, e.g. like Lighttable’s inline evaluation functionality and the exploratory coding abilities of the Swift Playground. On the frontend side of things, we have increasingly experienced the usefulness of things like live/hot reloading in our daily line of work, both for styles and code — preserving the state of web out pages, and particularly our focus, by reducing the mental overhead of context switches and the time spent waiting. Still, five years down the road, this is an incredibly inspiring and recommended watch!
- Summary written by Torgeir Thoresen
Let’s be mainstream! User focused design in Elm — Evan Czaplicki
In this talk, Evan Czaplicki, provides us with some insight into the philosophy behind the Elm language. He reasons around the various choices that were made relating to its syntax and architecture, as well as giving us some context to its creation. He also shares his thoughts around what constitutes a good programming language, mentioning properties like maintainability, usability and learnability but also emphasizing the importance of a surrounding community. All of this is presented in a light-hearted and entertaining way.
Being the creator of Elm, it is interesting to hear his thoughts on these matters. He argues well for controversial decisions like the omission of type classes and other features often found in functional languages, but makes it clear that none of these decisions are set in stone, and that we very well might see the addition of some of these features in the future.
All in all, this is a charming story of how Elm came into being, making it a must-watch for Elm-developers and -enthusiasts.
- Summary written by Kjetil Golid
The value of values — Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey’s talk challenges the way we think about about our information systems. He has an interesting approach to the mutability problem and argues strongly against what he calls place oriented programming (PLOP). He questions why we still think about memory and disk space as places instead of open systems, where each new fact requires new space and doesn’t replace old facts. He reminds us of what a fact really is, an event to have happened in the past. How good would your decision making be, if you only knew the most recent facts? Facts don’t change, while the contents of locations do, yet we build our information systems like this. One of his big takeaways is that a place has no role in an information model. We are missing out on the value of values!
An interesting watch by Hickey from 2012. He argues very well and keeps it interesting through his unusual approach to the mutability problem, still relevant today. You can look forward to this one!
- Summary written by Mats Jørgensen
