Apply to Become a Speaker!
Everyone is encouraged to apply to become a speaker and share their expertise at RVAJS. Topics can be varied as long as they pertain to JavaScript and would be relevant for a developer audience.
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About the Event
Get ready to boost your skills as we chat about everything JavaScript from TypeScript to Node.js to React.
RVAJS is a one-day conference dedicated to all things JavaScript, so join rvatech/ for the fifth annual RVA JavaScript Conference hosted at the Science Museum of Virginia. Registration will open soon and each year’s conference has been a great event with a sell-out crowd and we expect this year to be even better!
Venue
The Science Museum of Virginia – Dewey Gottwald Center
2500 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220
Parking:
Dewey Gottwald Center parking is located behind the museum. The parking lot entrance is located off of West Leigh Street beside the Commanders (Redskins) training camp – view detailed instructions.
GPS Address: 2301 W Leigh St Richmond, Va 23220
What to Expect
The 2023 RVAJS Conference will offer a range of sessions that provide JavaScript Developers and the overall amazing + vibrant RVA developer community the opportunity to interact, engage + further their skills together. There's still time to apply to become a speaker and share your insights during the conference!
Apply to Become a Speaker
2022 Schedule Archive
8:15 - 8:45 AM / Welcome
Opening Remarks
9:00 - 9:45
Room A: GraphQL Distilled
Speaker – Kito D Mann of Virtua, Inc.
REST is all about endpoints that perform specific queries or operations. This works fine, but the client is limited by which queries have been exposed. What if the backend exposed the data, but the client could decide which subset of data it needed, and how to interact with that data? That’s the promise of GraphQL — simplify the back-end, give the client more power, and make it easier to evolve APIs. When we take this approach, we also have more flexibility on the backend; we can use one or many different microservices together to provide a unified API. In this talk, we’ll explain what GraphQL is, how it works, and look at how easy it is to build GraphQL APIs using MicroProfile GraphQL.
Room B: Do you know these 10 JavaScript features?
Speaker – James Luterek of Elastic Path
For a language that was famously created in only two weeks, JavaScript is incredibly vast and continues to evolve. In this talk, I will be covering 10 features that are incredibly useful, but are barely known in the JavaScript programmer community.
10:00 - 10:45 AM
Room A: Building a Karaoke Machine with Angular and HTML5 Speech Recognition
Speaker – Sergio Cruz
I’ll use Angular, the HTML5 Web Speech API, and RxJS to create a web app to select songs, sync lyrics, and grade singers as they sing along. Watch one audience member bite the dust as they jump on stage at the end to test the final application and sing along to classic 80’s hits.
Room B: Advanced TypeScript Types
Speaker – Momin Khan of Teamflow & ROOT76 Games & RVA Game Jams
TypeScript is more than “JavaScript with types” – it’s a fully functional programming language. I will take you from the basics of TS through the most cutting edge features, and explain a development philosophy that will let you unleash its full power, without requiring a PhD in Computer Science!
11:00 - 11:45 AM
Room A: Remix: Embrace the Web
Speaker – Nick Daniel of En Dash Consulting
Have you ever had to code logic for navigations, loading/mutating/reloading data, or request cancellations in your apps? Have you ever gotten it wrong? Let me show you a future where you can let the new Remix Router handle all of that for you – all while coding in the UI library of your choosing.
Room B: Design patterns for modern JavaScript
Speaker – Justin Schroeder of FormKit Inc
When does it make sense to use WeakSets in the real world? How about Proxies, WeakMaps, WeakRefs, Generators, module scopes, and tagged template literals? In this talk, we’ll learn to solve real-world problems using design patterns enabled by modern JavaScript.
11:45 AM - 1:15 PM / Lunch + Networking
Lunch + Networking
1:15 - 2:00 PM
Room A: Future-proof your Web Apps with Web Components and LitElement
Speaker – Kito D Mann of Virtua, Inc.
Building a web app? Should you pick Angular, React, Vue, or something else? With a little bit of help from LitElement and LitHtml — libraries from Google’s Polymer team — you can build powerful web apps that run natively in all modern browsers
Room B: Building NestJS APIs and Microservices
Speaker – Jason Maggard of Atlantis Technology
Nest (NestJS) is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications. We will discuss the benefits of the NestJS framework and show how to quickly create a rest API.
2:15 - 3:00 PM
Room A: Hands on with Jest
Speaker – Chris Lorenzo of Comcast
Jest is a JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity designed to delight developers. Set up is easy, the api is great and well documented, yet we’ve all seen tests written for code coverage rather than functionality. Lets look at how to do it right.
Room B: APIs Need UX Too
Speaker – John Athayde of PowerFleet, Inc. / Meticulous, LLC
We spend an inordinate amount of time as developers working in textual interfaces, interacting with systems. These experiences can often drive us crazy with meaningless errors and minimal documentation. Let’s fix that.
3:15 - 4:00 PM
Room A: A11Y: Make your apps accessible.
Speaker – Nick Daniel of En Dash Consulting
Room B: Intro to Progressive Web Apps
Speaker – Chris Lorenzo of Comcast
What’s a progressive web app (PWA)? Should you turn your site into a PWA? Does it replace the need for a Native Web App? Do PWAs work offline?
This session will provide answers to these questions and show you how to create a reliable, fast and engaging PWA. We’ll work through enabling a web app for ‘Add to Home Screen’ support by creating a web app manifest and service worker. Next, we’ll leverage the service worker to optimize loading of images for different devices and network speeds. We’ll wrap up with pushing a web notification to our new PWA.
4:00 - 5:00 PM / Happy Hour
Post-conference Happy Hour and Networking!
2022 Speakers
Sergio Cruz
Director of Product Engineering
Ramsey Solutions
Matt Brophy
Senior Software Engineer
Remix
Justin Schroeder
FormKit Inc
Momin Khan
Staff Software Engineer
Teamflow & ROOT76 Games & RVA Game Jams
John Athayde
PowerFleet, Inc. / Meticulous, LLC
Nick Daniel
En Dash Consulting
Kito D Mann
Virtua, Inc.
Jason Maggard
Atlantis Technology
Chris Lorenzo
Comcast
James Luterek
Head of Developer Advocacy
Elastic Path
