Today is Saturday and I thought that I would write a summary about the second day of Nordic.js, while I’m recovering from yesterday’s epic after party at Trädgården.

Personally, I think that the second day was even better than the first day. The theme of the second day was focused on performance in JavaScript and on the web. Not all talks were performance related - the day also had talks about Web Audio and how to build desktop applications using web technologies.

If you haven’t seen the post about the first day you should check that out as well. I will also update this post when the talks become available.

Franziska Hinkelmann: A Trip to the Zoo: SpiderMonkey, SquirrelFish, Nashorn, and V8

This morning’s talk was dedicated to the different JavaScript engines and the work that has been put into them to make them as fast as they are today. Knowing how these optimizations have been done can help you understand how to write your code to make the most out of the engine. However, be sure you are optimizing the right thing.

Talk on: Youtube

Matthew Podwysocki: Async and Streaming Programming in JS - We’re All Wrong

Matt’s talk was about the problems with Async programming today. Such as callback hell and how Promises might solve the symptom of callback hell but some of the problems are still there. The talk was also about Reactive Programming with frameworks like RxJS and how it together with observables can be used for making code easier to read.

Talk on: Youtube, Github

Soledad Penadés: Hands on Web Audio

Like with the first day, some of the talks were more inspirational. For me, Soledad’s talk was one of them. It gave an introduction to the Web Audio API and how there is more that can be done when it comes to audio than to play MP3s.

Talk on: Youtube

Paul Lewis: Performance on RAILs

This was probably one of my favorites today. Paul talked about the RAILs framework that can be used as a tool for working with performance in different stages of a web page.

Talk on: Youtube

Amy Palamountain: Building native applications with JavaScript and Atom Shell

Amy talked about how you can use Electron, formerly known as atom-shell, to build desktop applications by using web technologies. I think it’s cool that you can take something as platform independent as the web and use it for building applications for more than one platform.

Talk on: Youtube

Jake Archibald: Modern progressive enhancement

To me, this talk was not that much about how you can progressively enhance your web pages, but more about making the experience better for those users that can leverage the new browser features that exist or are coming soon.

Jake also talked about performance and how you can use progressive enhancement to lower the time to first interaction. I think it all bottles down to what Alice said the first day. We have to put in the hard work to make things more simple for user.

Talk on: Youtube, Speakerdeck

Rebecca Murphey: Deploying JS apps, 1,000 (or so) at a time

The last talk of the day (and the conference) was about how Bazar Voice was thinking about how to make it easier to deploy their single page apps for their customers. As Rebecca said in her talk, the way they deploy apps might not be suitable for everything and I kind of agree with that they have a unique situation when it comes to deploying web apps as they have to deploy over 1000 apps each time.

Talk on: Youtube, Speakerdeck