The first day of Nordic.js is coming to an end and it has been a great first day. The line up of speakers have been great and while some, in my opinion, performed better than others the overall experience has been great.

I also like the diversity in the type of talks that was given. They have been both practical and inspirational and not all have been necessarily technological in its nature.

The talks given today was the following listed below. I will link to them when they become available via the Nordic.js website.

Bert Belder: Ingredients for a great open source project

Bert works at StrongLoop and held the keynote at the conference. His talk was about what was needed to make an open source project great. He used his involvement in Node.js as en example and talked a lot about its history and how different factors impacts an open source project. These factors include leadership, money and community.

Talk on: Youtube

Tara Jane Feener: Creating Expressive UI with ReactJS

Tara talked about what expressive means and how it relates to code and dev tools. Code becomes more expressive when it is easier to understand and she also talked about how tools and frameworks like CoffeScript; React.js (and ECMAScript 6) helps us write such code.

Talk on: Youtube

Jakob Mattson: Forgotten Funky Functions

Jakob’s talk was more on the practical side and contained a lot of code examples. He talked about Functions, Meta Programming and the no need for classes. The later part not being something I completely agree with as the classes in ECMAScript 6 is basically syntactic sugar for the same way of creating classes today in ECMAScript 5. It just makes it easier to read. However, I can agree with that classes might not always be needed for all JavaScript applications.

Talk on: Youtube, Speakerdeck

Alice Bartlett: Bin your select-tags

Alice’s talk was a bit less technical and was more about the importance of UX. It contained the examples about how a regular select box might not be the best solution and that we are building things for real people and not browsers. Also, the fact that it sometimes might be worth putting in some hard work to make things simpler for the users.

Talk on: Youtube, Speakerdeck

Zeno Rocha: Augmented reality with JavaScript

Zeno had a more inspirational talk. It was still practical, showing how to build AR applications in JavaScript using tracking.js, but in the core it was about leaving our comfort zone and experiment and find the place that the magic happens.

Talk on: Youtube, Speakerdeck

Kate Hudson: Advanced front-end automation with npm scripts

Kate talked about why you don’t need complicated build tools like grunt and gulp and how using npm script might be enough. Most tools around building your front-end code comes with command line interfaces what can be used. This means that you wouldn’t need to know how grunt and gulp to help out with the build script.

Talk on: Youtube Reading list

Felix Palmer: Through the looking glass - programming on the GPU using WebGL

Felix talk was about how WebGL can be used for more than just displaying graphic and how it can be leverage for doing more computational things.

Talk on: Youtube, Github