Blog Posts

Sharing my experience from JS Conf Eu 2019

Intro

Last week I attended the Js Conf Eu 2019, in Berlin Germany. It was one extraordinary experience for me, as my first conference in my career. Except for the fact of gaining new knowledge, this conference was a perfect place for exchanging practical and intuitive ways of using JavaScript.

What presentations did I attend?

Among the rich schedule of events and high renominated speakers, I attended the presentations that caught my eye and were interesting in some way, either directed in a practical or theoretical way. There were a bunch of talks about the usage and the power of JavaScript nowadays, in the path of becoming one of the most powerful programming languages. The presentations that remained in my memory are the JavaScript's Journey to the Edge by Ashley Williams and the Performance Empathy by Housein Djireh, Teaching kids to code by Jason Straughan, Shape Of The Web by Henri Helvetica, as well the presentations about the usage and implementation of Node.js .

What I've learned?

Serverless architecture is taking over the IT world and it is giving a nice foundation for building more affordable apps with higher performance efficiency. Before we dive into the programming sea, it is very important to know how the internet works, and probably give some thought of how it will be working in the future. The accessibility of data, either on mobile or desktop devices need to be rendered with really high frequency. The load time of data shouldn't be more than 3 seconds, that's why it is important to talk and think more deeply of improving the basic client-server architecture. Ashley Williams in her talk made interesting analogy of referencing for data as pizza and data transfer as pizza accessibility. Data Centers contain the Edge Architecture that we are about to elaborate in this post.

In the process of Client side rendering, what it is actually done is that the chef is transferred to the client, and the java script is executed on the place where the client is located. Client side rendering + Cache is improved version of the basic rendering, in this case the JS program is sent to the specific point of presence where is stored, and from that point it is re-sent to the point of its execution. Server Side Rendering, with the appearance of Node.js that offers unifying of web development, this made the server accessible to the JS developers. But lets get back to our pizza example for server side rendering, so the chef is preparing the pizza in its place. The JS code is executing in one place and the output is sent right away to the client. So as we can see in client side we sent the chef, and in server side rendering we sent the pizza, that is the main difference. Server Side Rendering + Cache, in this type of rendering we sent the pizza to our point of presence or cache station, and then the pizza is re-sent to the client, but not intuitive approach. What if the client wants to add some toppings on it pizza, we should do all the way around to give the client the desired output. Let's get to the point. What is actually Edge-side rendering?

As we can see from the picture above, the edge-side architecture gives the chef opportunity to cook in the basket, or to execute the JS code in the actual data center or point of presence, presented with cache memory. And the output of the code is then sent to the end user. So let's get to the benefits that we have with using edge-side rendering. Our circle of thoughts will be closed as we begun, how fast is this architecture and how are acting the benchmarks when we talk about the load time of presented data of certain device. The edge-side rendering offers us faster rendering of data, but we should implement some crucial changes in order to implement this architecture in our IT environment. First the client code need to be executed directly on server, also we need to bring the app where the big data is stored, and the web browsers should run all the code from the web pages. But how can we use this architecture? Yes, here is Cloudflare Workers, that can deploy serverless JavaScript to data centers across 180 cities that can give the code exceptional performance and reliability. Also I learnt about this new npm module, called Wrangler, that can be installed as it is shown on the photo bellow, and can offer us easy way of creating DNS, and convenient way of publishing code on certain fresh domain created in few seconds.

The Culture and Environment in the Conference

The JSConfEu, was happening in the Treptow-Berlin Arena, where the old and modern create a perfect fusion of infrastructure. The atmosphere was really friendly and perfect for expanding the network of IT colleagues. Also the main leading companies in the IT world took place, with their stands for exchanging experiences and sharing their work ethics.

Conclusion

My general view of visiting conferences is really beneficial, because the fact that you can meet people from all around the world that have more experience that you, and gaon knowledge that can help you grow more in the domain of your career. Also you can get inspired to look out of the box, and create something amazing, that can change the whole IT world.