🎥 This event will be presented remotely

Please make sure to RSVP to the Meetup event (link above) for an invite to the conference call.

⚡️ This month in NottsJS is lightning talks! ⚡️

Come along to hear from members of our community and share your thoughts or experiences! Sign up on the day to give a talk! The talks will be 5 - 10 mins each and can be either technical or non-technical. Slides are optional so don't feel you need to prepare a talk in advance!

We can't wait to see you all there 🥳

🎥 This event will be presented remotely

Please make sure to RSVP to the Meetup event (link above) for an invite to the conference call.

This month we'll be presenting a talk from James covering Node.js Worker Threads which became stable in version 12.

We'll hear about what they are, how they work, the challenges with using them, and the challenges we have with profiling them.

This talk is sure to have a lot of technical insight into a feature we will see in use every day. As tooling mature, Worker Threads promise to become the standard way to build highly performant Node.js apps.

🎥 This event will be presented remotely

Please make sure to RSVP to the Meetup event (link above) for an invite to the conference call.

We have two great talks lined up for April!

🎤 Web Security for Complete Beginners (and other people)

by Mark Goodwin

This talk covers the basics of Web Security at a level suitable for web developers with little or no previous knowledge of security.

Mark will tell you what you need to know common web security problems, how they're exploited, and some things you can do to protect your applications against them.

This talk will also include some useful perspectives for folk who perhaps already know some of the facts.

🎤 How not to get pwned by XSS

by Samuel King

In this talk we will be looking at Cross Site Scripting and how to avoid getting owned by it! Sam will be covering a variety of different XSS exploits, how to detect them using ZAP, and how a Content Security Policy can be used to prevent XSS attacks.

Sam is a second-year Computer Science Student at the University of Nottingham and is presenting his first tech talk as an 'apprentice' to Mark Goodwin. Sam has been actively involved in the Nottingham tech community since he arrived here just a year ago working with HackSoc Nottingham to put on guest speaker events.

⚠️ EVENT CANCELLED ⚠️

Due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) situation we have been forced to cancel this event.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for both the inconvenience and the late notice. We will be back in April! 🎉

This month we have a great security themed event lined up! There'll be two great talks from Mark Goodwin and Samuel King.

'Web Security for Complete Beginners (and other people)' by Mark Goodwin

This talk covers the basics of Web Security at a level suitable for web developers with little or no previous knowledge of security.

Mark will tell you what you need to know about the basics of common web security problems, how they're exploited and some things you can do to protect your applications against them.

This talk will also include some useful perspective for folks who perhaps already know some of the facts.

Mark is a software security specialist with decades of experience in building and securing Internet-facing systems. Mark currently works for Mozilla on the Firefox web browser.

'How not to get pwned by XSS' by Samuel King

Along with a talk, we will be looking to gather community input of what interests you and how NottsJS can support you! Look forward to the return of the infamous "Cool Wall" and more!

Food and drinks will be provided (courtesy of our sponsors) and we'll finish the evening with a drink at the Canalhouse (as usual 🙂).

For our February event we have the lovely DDD East Midlands organisers and all around local legends Jess White & Moreton Brockley helping everyone get a kick start to their public speaking career.

Some details about their talk:

Our tech community is full of bright and interesting people each with their unique experiences and points of view. Every person has valuable content to share, including YOU!

Jessica and Moreton will talk through the benefits of speaking, both to your career and personally. You will learn how to come up with a talk idea, write an abstract and bio for submission and take the first steps to become a speaker. Find out the hints and tips to make this whole experience easier and more enjoyable.

This talk is for all levels. By the end, you will have the tools and inspiration to present to give speaking a try.

Food and drinks will be provided (courtesy of our sponsors) and we'll finish the evening with a drink at the Canalhouse (as usual 🙂).

Happy new year, NottsJS friends! 🥂🍾

Our community has many skills, and with many skills comes a huge variety of possibilities of things we can make together!

To kick off the new year, we'll have a hands-on session with our very own Dave! 🙂

He'll be running a practical session in which we'll create a temperature monitoring system using an Espruino and some JavaScript.

It should be great fun, so bring your laptop so we can get practical! Food and drinks will be provided (courtesy of our sponsors) and we'll finish the evening with a drink at the Canalhouse (as usual 🙂).

Hello JS friends!

For our December event, we’re planning a laid back closure to the year 😊

Dave and Carol, along with a few of the NottsJS community members, will be attending dotJS next week, so we thought it’d be nice for them to share their favourite bits of the conference.

And then, we’ll have a Christmas quiz! We’ll have prizes to be won, but we’re mainly looking to have some Christmassy fun. Hope to see you there!

Food and drinks will be provided (courtesy of our sponsors) and we’ll finish the evening with a drink at the Canalhouse (as usual 🙂).

The most common use of JavaScript for game development is to recreate a classic game of Pong or Breakout, often to practice the language.

However, there are many more possibilities within game development than just plain HTML and JavaScript and many are fantastic for developing new skills or for a fun side project.

In this talk, we will be discussing various techniques of developing 2D and 3D games for web, mobile and even smartwatch. We'll be covering general concepts of development and touching on various frameworks to enhance these different areas, such as Pixi.js and Phaser.js, which can transform a simple 2D browser game to a fully fledged mobile or desktop game.

There will also be additional mentions of integrating well-known technologies such as React and Vue.js, into our games to make the jump into game development less of a learning curve than you may think.

Food and drinks will be provided (courtesy of our sponsors) and we'll finish the evening with a drink at the Canalhouse (as usual 🙂).

Do you know if your last deployment slowed page load times or increased error rates of your single-page application? Discover the next frontier of front-end development by implementing real-time performance monitoring and alerting capabilities using Elasticsearch.

In this talk, Ersel will share the learnings from integrating a react based single page application with Elasticsearch at BrightHR, an award winning SaaS solution operating in UK, Canada and Australia.

You'll learn how metrics such as page load, asset download, network call times and errors can be captured to monitor the health and performance of your front-end in real-time.

But wait, there's more!

To celebrate Hacktoberfest, FOSS community superheroes Anna and Jamie will give a short talk and run a workshop to get everyone contributing to open source! Here's a little bit about their session:

In a noble effort to bring more people into the open source community, every October anyone can participate in Hacktoberfest. All you need to do is contribute to an open source project and you could get a free t-shirt as well as the pride that comes with being a part of something bigger.

In this session we’ll introduce you to Hacktoberfest and open source, talk about how to get involved and then lead a workshop where people can get started making contributions. Bring your laptop along if you can!

This month in NottsJS we'll have Lightning Talks!

Come along to hear from members of our community, and share your own experiences if you like! Each talk will be 5 minutes each, with no theme (does not have to be JS).

You can make slides if you like, but there's no need to prepare, just get up there and talk to us for a few minutes. Hope to see you all there! 💛

We'll have food and drinks provided, courtesy of our sponsors, and go for a drink at Canalhouse to finish it off, as usual 🙂

Laura is heading up to Nottingham to introduce us to Houdini and the things it can do! She'll talk about paint worklets, the CSSOM, the layout API, how all these things interact with one another, and why they have the same name!

Join us for Laura's talk, some food and drink, and a chat with your local JS community.

Food and drink are provided by our wonderful sponsors! Just bring yourself 😀

All the cool kids use SVG. Vector graphics are small, fast, and can do all sorts of amazing things.

This talk will explain what SVGs are, how to use them, techniques to make them as small and fast as possible, and some nifty tricks you can use.

This talk will cover an overview of the core features and patterns of Vue.js. We'll see some demos that show how easy it is to get started with the framework which will show the Vuetify material component framework, and the front end testing framework Cypress.io.

This talk will be given remotely.

Small UI animations can make a big difference in the quality and ease of use of our apps. In this talk we'll look at ways we can approach building small, effective animations using CSS, incorporating them into a theme, and using a helpful package to make useful, consistent animation easy to build.

We have some prizes to give away to attendees of this event! Be sure to attend to be in with a chance of winning a free pass for Donovan's Udemy course!

This talk will be given remotely.

Serverless is becoming mainstream, but sometimes it is being abused more than it is being used correctly.

In this talk David will explain his reasons to be careful on the use cases for serverless and showcase an example on how to build a identity verification system with a single lambda on GCP, integrating with the Vision API.

Modern websites using JavaScript to render page content (such as React, Angular, Vue etc) are now so common that it's rare to find a website without at least some sort of JavaScript modifying the DOM. This can lead to unexpected results in searches, with little or no support for your website's rendering code.

Search engines such as Google have very specific support for rending your website during a crawl. Edd will run through how Googlebot works, how JavaScript websites can improve their rankings, and present some examples.

Life in the early days of the web was hard. One day your HTML is disintegrating, the next you are fighting someone named "~Ninjad00d~" who has found a way to take over your forum system. Lessons in security in these days were hard learned.

These are the true stories from the early days of the web and how forums, chat rooms and online games were turned upside down for fun and profit. If you stick around after laughing at the misfortune of online pioneers, there will also be lessons about finding your way in a world that wants to exploit your every mistake.

We are not in control of social networks, but we use them for most of our interactions online. They get to decide how our content is shown, may not provide us programmatic access to it, and try to run annoying adverts around it (if they bother to create a "business plan"), then shut down in a couple of years and your content is gone.

It can be difficult to decide to put content on websites we own because there isn't a ready made group of people to connect and share it with. By using standards from the IndieWeb we can connect our personal sites with others to get the benefits of a social network while owning our content.

In this talk, you'll see how we can authenticate ourselves, share posts, reply to and like content, and combine our personal sites with our existing social network profiles.

Bring your laptop!

This month we will be running a fun and collaborative practical session with WarriorJS.

An exciting game of programming and Artificial Intelligence

WarriorJS is a coding challenge structured around the concept of a dungeon crawler game where the programmer plays a warrior attempting to solve challenges in each level.

Players will to take turns in each attempt at solving the current level in Randori Kata style, with teams of up to 4 people and one laptop rotating through the driver seat.

We hope you enjoy this chance to code purely for fun (sorry, no prizes!)

The average website page weight is 50% images and 25% video. As the images and videos delivered to mobile devices get larger and larger, the load time of websites gets slower and slower. Further complicating matters, there are thousands of screens and devices with varying resolutions and CPU power that receive this content.

In this talk, we’ll examine strategies to send the perfect image or video to every device, ensuring a fast, beautiful rendering of your content. We’ll look at how to test our content, and describe responsive images, delivering progressive images, and finally optimizing all of this content for fast delivery to each screen.

Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of how to efficiently deliver beautiful images to every device that accesses their content.

We're entering a promising new era of computing.

The advance of machine learning and artificial intelligence is reviving interest in conversational interfaces. This creates the potential for conversation as the new mode of interaction with technology.

The big problem is recognizing spoken input has been mostly solved, but a new challenge has arisen: how to build a user experience that's modelled after natural human conversation.

This talk outlines the basic mechanics of conversation, introduces core principles to design by, and presents you with a practical UI to start creating conversational experiences that engage, delight, and truly help your users. We'll also be building a voice enabled bot using JavaScript!

We all know the benefits performance has on our users, but what are some practical ways we can improve application performance?

In this talk, we will focus on improving performance, as well as the different tactics on how to decrease cold starts for your serverless containers.

We'll look at improving TTFB (time to first byte) responses from your express servers, and much more!

Note that this event was cancelled due to attendance concerns. It will be rescheduled!

Bring your laptop!

This month we will be running a fun and collaborative practical session with WarriorJS.

An exciting game of programming and Artificial Intelligence

WarriorJS is a coding challenge structured around the concept of a dungeon crawler game where the programmer plays a warrior attempting to solve challenges in each level.

Players will to take turns in each attempt at solving the current level in Randori Kata style, with teams of up to 4 people and one laptop rotating through the driver seat.

We hope you enjoy this chance to code purely for fun (sorry, no prizes!)

This month's speaker is Rob from opendataservices.coop, a tech cooperative which helps people and organisations publish and use open data in a variety of fields from international development, government procurement, to philanthropy.

The goal is to help organisations have an impact on the world - to make taxes go further, to stop corruption, increase the effectiveness of aid, and to help make sure that charity money goes where it's needed most.

Underpinning all of this JSON Schema (and some XML Schema, if you dig around the back of the closet).

In this talk we'll hear from Rob about how cooperatives are awesome, what open data is, and why it's such a good thing. We will see some examples of where standardised open data has improved lives, and learn about the open data of Nottingham.

Come along this May to see Lightning Talks from members of the community! We welcome talk proposals beforehand, which we'll gladly assist with, or come along on the day and put forward a talk!

Been playing with a new package? Found it useful? Come talk!

Solved a deployment issue with TravisCI? Would like to share it? Come talk!

Would like to start using something that you've not had time to look into? Give it some research and come talk about it!

Anything around JavaScript that you'd like to speak about for between 5 to 15 minutes is welcome! We'll hold 5 mins after each talk for questions, and then move on to the next one.

Post your lightning talk idea on the issues list and we'll get you scheduled in https://github.com/nottsjs/speakers/issues/45.

See you there!

...it would be nice to have one who questioned their own thoughts

• Joshua Hawxwell

This month we are proud to present Josh Hawxwell with a talk on something he is very passionate about: functional programming!

We'll take a look at some of the many things that the term "functional programming" can mean, and to what degree that applies to JavaScript. Then we'll look at how these ideas (which are present in Elm) allow us to easily write safe front-end applications, with comparisons to other frameworks and packages such as React and Redux.

After the talk we'll have a workshop session where attendees will be divided into two groups of AngularJS and React, and discuss the positives and negatives between re-implementations of a simple Elm app in either framework.

We hope to see you there!

Join us for an action packed month as we feature a talk on Umbraco CMS, a Lean Coffee, and we see 2018's first edition of the Cool Wall!

We will hear from Paul about how to build websites on the Umbraco framework in headless mode. Paul's a great speaker with extensive experience of content management systems and Umbraco. Through this talk, you can expect to take away the skills and knowledge to get to grips quickly with Umbraco's headless mode in a familiar React setting.

We'll also present an interactive Lean Coffee session where we aim to find out which technologies, speakers and workshops YOU would like to see at NottsJS in 2018.

The ever-popular Cool Wall will see a return for 2018, where we will get the chance to rate the current tech offerings in the form of pseudo-representative fashion labels related to unspecified yet approximate temperature guides - "coolness".

See you there!

Due to unforeseeable problems, we have had to cancel the Amazon Alexa talk by David Low, and are replacing it with another talk about Node JS in the Cloud. We are looking to reschedule the Amazon Alexa talk for January.

During this session we will aim to build a server-less RESTful API based upon Amazon's AWS cloud technologies.

This is intended as a high-level hands-on session, where you can get exposure to a wide number of intersecting technologies, giving us the opportunity to do a deep dive on each individual component in future sessions.

In this session we will use: Node JS, Lambda, API Gateway, IAM Security & Document DB.

These will be included into a Blue Peter style "here's one I made earlier" React Website to show off the capabilities.

If you are planning on joining in then please register for an Amazon AWS account BEFORE the event. Amazon offer a 12 month free tier which will cover your needs, but you will need to supply payment details.

Dot catch! Dot catch!
- David Wood

Many of us know about the benefits of offloading concurrent I/O operations through the use of callbacks, libraries such as async and bluebird, or using the new Promise support in browsers and Node.js. But, do you know how these work, and when you should use them?

In this talk we will review the benefits, pitfalls, and ways to implement concurrent JavaScript code in Node.js and the browser. We'll look at the support for async/await, how this differs from callbacks and asynchronous libraries, and take a brief look at how these have been implemented to gain a better understanding of what's going on under the hood.

At the end of this talk you will be able to make more informed decisions about the use of synchronous API methods such as readFileSync, choosing to listen to error events, and why wrapping function calls in try..catch may or may not be useful.

Is this thing on?
- Chris Kemp

Come see how you can make mobile apps with javascript using React.Native, facebook's framework for building mobile apps.

This will be a hands-on workshop, where Windows users can create an Android App, and Mac users get to choose Android or iPhone.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

You will need Android studio or xcode installed to get the simulators up and running.

Please join NottsJS and Martin Kearn for "Machine Learning for Muggles".

Artificial Intelligence is the latest hotness. Machine Learning sits behind artificial intelligence and on the surface it may seem like a deeply technical, scientific topic. We are here to tell you that it is more accessible than you think. We'll look at some of the basics around the Azure Machine Learning service. We'll also look some of the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs which make it very easy to implement artificial intelligence ‘smarts' into your application with simple, standard REST calls via any programming language or platform, including JavaScript.

Join us with our guest speaker Manthan Dave with his talk: "Up and running with chat bots: A journey from being a noob to being awesome"

The chat bot revolution is upon us and every developer wants to build one. This workshop will take them on an epic journey starting from basics and writing a simple chat bot, all the way to learning advanced concepts.

Ever wondered what goes behind a good chat bot? Do you want to build one? Well this workshop is for you!

Complexity can be diffused as soon as you peek behind the curtain. A chat bot, like a website might look complex from the outside, but the reality is different.

This workshop will be divided into three sections. The first section will cover the basic anatomy of a chat bot. Next, we'll work together to build a chat bot. We'll start simple with a chat bot that'll tell us knock knock and chuck norris jokes. Towards the end of the workshop, we'll go over some advanced concepts that can help us scale our chat bot to have more features.

So come! Join us on an awesome journey to talkify our bots!

Presenting Jonathan Kingston with his talk and workshop: "Firefox Containers, isolating the web whilst hacking web extensions".

Bring your laptops with a copy of Firefox Nightly installed as we will hack away at building your own extensions using bleeding edge features.

Firefox Containers tabs are an experimental platform feature for tab management and isolating browsing to solve security and privacy issues.

With the recent launch of containers to test pilot, I'm going to walk through how they are built. Web Extensions are the new cross browser way of adding features to the browser built entirely from JavaScript and other web technologies. New web extension features were added to Firefox for building our containers experiment that you can use today.

I will cover the basics of building extensions so we can have half the evening on hacking and making extensions.

Image credit: Carolyn Jaeger

Don't point that thing at me.
- Chris Kemp

React is currently my favourite JavaScript framework, and I used it recently to create the Notts Dev Workshop website. It led me to the realisation that NottsJS really should be showcasing JavaScript based web development. (I know! Really?!)

Most people don't get to try a new technology in their day-to-day job, so they do it in their spare time. These people then don't get to apply what they've learnt to a real-world problem.

So that's exactly what I you will be doing. My plan is to use slave labour to enable you to build our website.

I will be acting as your customer and will be signing off your final work, so expect me to try to give you a live example of what it means to use this technology in a real setting.

So please join us in building a real-world react website.

elm. A delightful language for reliable webapps.
- elm-lang.org

Elm is a domain-specific, purely functional programming language used for declaratively creating client-side web apps which compile to JavaScript.

In this talk you'll be shown The Elm Architecture, a nestable pattern for building applications, and Elm's full type inference system that helps prevent users from running into errors.

We'll look at how Elm handles HTTP requests and websockets, how it handles uncertainty, the use of partial function application for reusable views, interaction with JS libraries, and how data immutability gives you undo/redo for only a few lines of code.

Nottingham's biggest and brightest tech events are coming together to celebrate the stellar growth of the community by throwing another awesome Christmas party.

We're taking over the National Videogame Arcade, with full access to all the games and exhibits, an organised games tournament with pizza and drinks.

Tickets are just £5! The price of your ticket includes full access to the National Videogame Arcade, the games tournament and pizza.

First tickets released this Friday 11th November at midday

• Buy your ticket now!

"You're using <insert_old_framework>? That's so 2015. You need to use <insert_new_framework>!"
- Javascript Developers

With something that is approaching attention deficit disorder there's new JavaScript frameworks emerging weekly. Even the godfather of modern JS development, jQuery, has been knocked from its perch and is considered passé.

So what do we do now? How do we leverage the good tech, while avoiding the cargo cults?

This month we're going for something completely new. Enter The Cool Wall. A segment that will prove so popular that Jeremy Clarkson will invent Time Travel to steal it from us and make into a popular segment on Top Gear.

This month's session will be a group discussion piece where we talk about the state of modern JavaScript development and our place in this world.

"The application cache is a douchebag"
- Jake Archibald

Web apps can be pretty cool, but we could be making them even cooler. Browsers are leveling up by adding functionality to enable a user experience akin to using a native mobile application.

Enter the new buzz-phrase of the moment… Progressive Web Apps!

This talk aims to share knowledge gained from Dan's time at FullStack 2016 conference, and the lessons learned from implementing the features into real web applications. The goal is to provide more than just a high level overview; you should be able to walk away confident that you can implement these features into your own web apps straight away.

You'll find out why you should care, what's available, see a demo and see what features are offered in browsers.

In today's online world, user experience is key. Users expect slick interfaces that are intuitive, informative and engaging. More and more, building apps that update the user in Realtime are becoming an essential part of this experience

• and we can see this every day with things like Google Docs, Facebook Notifications, Slack and BBC Live Text.

RethinkDB is a fully featured, opensource, NoSQL database designed to make developing for the Realtime Web easy. We'll talk about changefeeds, clustering and how combining with Node.js can help you avoid some of the pitfalls of building rich, engaging, Realtime Apps to scale and across multiple platforms.

By the end of this talk you'll be ready to go back and create your first Realtime App with RethinkDB and Node.js.