Scotland.js

May 23 2013

Photo credit - STV Edinburgh

A little over a week ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Scotland.js, a two day JavaScript conference hosted in the centre of Edinburgh.

My talk

Being my first proper speaking engagement, I was very nervous in the run up to the event. Its no secret that public speaking is one of man’s top phobias, and I guess I’m no different in that respect.

Anyhow I’m happy to report that my talk went down well, and I received some great comments afterwards from a handful of attendees which was very much appreciated. It managed to provoke some interesting discussion in the Q&A session and later on in the pub too!

My talk, entitled “Writing testable, scalable, maintainable rock solid JavaScript” was geared around how to unit test your client side code, and explained some of the lesser well known benefits of unit testing. I also shared some tips and techniques that we use at Sage in order to make our code more decoupled. You can see my slides on SpeakerDeck or check them out in the embed below.

The video will be released sometime in the next few weeks so make sure to follow me or Scotland.js on Twitter to ensure you don’t miss it.

Scotland.js

The conference itself was a blast! I learnt a lot of cool stuff about Node.js, client side databases like IndexedDB and leveldb, and to how to work around heavily nested asynchronous calls with bacon!

The networking and social side of the conference was top notch! There was somewhere in the region of one hundred attendees, and because of this the atmosphere was very welcoming and friendly. Consequently I got to meet and chat with a load of other software developers from all over the globe in the breaks and afterward in the pub. I remember having great conversations with Coby, Colin, Igor, Stefan, Peter, Jan and Dominic to name a few.

I really wish more conferences were this intimate, as I find that larger crowds invite cliquish behaviour. Something which make it pretty intimidating if you want to approach and chat.

I’d like to thank Peter Aiken for having me and Neo for putting on such a great event!

Also for the support that my friends and colleagues in Sage have given me in gearing up for the conference(you know who you are), it’s very much appreciated!

Talk