FSTOCO – November 2014 Conference thoughts

The Full Stack Toronto conference had a great vibe and useful talks. 2 weeks later, here are some themes that stick out in my mind:

Agile/Lean Methodologies

The first not-keynote presentation I saw was “Taking a Lean Approach to Client Projects”, and from then on this style of work came up repeatedly. Either everyone wants to work this way, or everyone is already.

Here are slides from @HiraJaved10’s talk on doing UX Research without slowing down the agile process
Monolothic Applications become microservices

This topic came up in a few presentations as well. Everyone wants to break apart the big Ruby on Rails apps they started 4ish years ago into smaller services. Why? To make it easier for teams to divide and conquer. This can speed up QA cycles, deployment, and ease scaling.

Here are slides from @mchacki’s presentation on Microservices
AngularJS is THE full-featured front-end framework

Here’s the vibe I get:
- AngularJS is hot right now
- React.js + Flux + other stuff is too new
- Backbone is too old
- Ember is something else
- People don’t build big sites with just jQuery. Except for IBM maybe.
Here is code and slides from @ericwgreene’s talk on Angular’s $digest loop.
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

This book got multiple shout-outs, and new version is coming out early 2015. Hooray!

Presenter Dejan Glozic has more thoughts on the conference. Tweets in this stream should be relevant until the next monthly meetup in 2015!