My Top 3 Favorite Moments from Midwest JS 2015
This past August, I went to Minneapolis for the first time to attend Midwest JS. This conference focuses on the different Javascript approaches that companies and tech leads are using in their day-to-day workflow. From Angular to React to Ember, we discussed it all. At the end of the conference, my brain was full but extremely inspired.
With so many great speakers and talks there were plenty of great moments. Here are some of my favorites:
- Making an Angular App with Kevin Bosak & Travis Martensen
- Venkat Subramaniam‘s talk The Art of Simplicity
- David Washington‘s talk Building Web Touch Experiences That Don’t Suck
Hands-on Coding
Other conferences sometimes shy away from too much coding in order to accommodate a greater number of people. This conference does the opposite. This first day was dedicated to coding an app. You could pick from Angular, Node, or React and away you go!
This wasn’t the only coding in this conference. Every talk I went to had code examples and some speakers live-coded a full functioning app right in front of us.
Philosophy
Venkat’s talk was arguably my favorite of the conference. All while in his socks he walked us through the key to good coding: Simplicity. “The genius is having nothing in here that distracts from the focus.”
Simple is not clever, it’s not the flashiest or fanciest. It gets the job done in the most efficient way. Simple as that.
Design meets Development
David’s talk one of the only talks of the conference that bridged design and development. Learning the best practices for designing and developing for touch is crucial to all who work on the web today.
“With touch, you’re not designing for pixels – you’re designing for anatomy.” For so long we’ve considered computers a tool; a machine that functions and performs a service. But nowadays with phones and tablets at our disposal, computers have become essential to our everyday routine. Now the usage and handling of each device must be considered. In order to improve the user’s experience we must design as if these devices and applications were an extension of self.
In the end it was an incredibly informative trip and a well-done conference that I highly recommend to all developers. Minneapolis is beautiful and while there I had the opportunity to take a few photos of downtown:
