JavaScript Talks

Remember loving to read comics on a Sunday afternoon when you were a kid? Maybe you don’t. In the past, traditional print comics have made it impossible for blind and visually-impaired readers to experience their heroes’ adventures first-hand. Today an increasing number of initiatives like comic book stores for the blind aim to overcome this challenge. What if I told you that the web platform empowers us to even create comics for literally everyone? Alongside a demo application, you see how accessibility best practices enable you to craft an immersive webcomic experience that is not only engaging for the sighted but accessible for everyone.

Javascript runs on nearly any platform. Most languages can compile to Javascript. It’s well-positioned to become the lingua franca of programmers, with one problem: Like most programming languages, Javascript is based on English. 89% of the world’s population doesn’t speak any English. Many of those people can’t even read the Latin script. If we want Javascript to be a lingua franca, we need to ensure it is accessible to all people, regardless of their native language. Let’s look at the barriers that non-native speakers face when contributing to OSS Javascript projects and what it would take to remove them entirely, so that two developers could collaborate without speaking the same language. We will see what techniques Javascript can borrow from other languages by taking a look at করো (koro), a project which adds Bengali support to the Go compiler. And, we will learn enough about compilers and character encoding to answer the eternal question: “Could we do this in Javascript?”

In 2009 I was managing Yahoo’s tech event budget when we agreed to sponsor the very first JSConf, the one that almost didn’t happen, the one that started something… And though I’ve still never attended a JSConf, nor learned to code, the zeitgeist of the JavaScript community and its event culture have had a profound effect on how I live and the devrel work I do. I’d like to speak about cultivating “JavaScript: The Good Times”—the evolution of inclusiveness, the effort to replace customs that no longer reflect the values and demographics of the community, the focus on new practices for joyful conference-going and knowledge sharing. The JavaScript ethos has fueled a reinvention of the tech gathering as an act of participation and experiment, generating enduring artifacts for learning and excellent new habits for our relationships - personal and professional.

There’s a divisive movement around the world which has arguable impacted the software development community. How can we remain open-minded and respectful when talking about different programming paradigms or languages? In this talk, I will be talking about empathy, how we can have divergent views and still have meaningful conversations.