In the last few months, I have been regularly attending the WarsawJS meetups for professionals and enthusiasts of JavaScript. Today I’d like to share my brief (personal and subjective) review of yesterday’s talks.
“Bootcamps from the perspective of a trainer and a developer”
Michał Michalczuk took on the topic of bootcamps and their effectiveness based on statistics. I appreciated that he had a critical view on the whole idea, even though he himself is a bootcamp organizer.
Michał raised a few valid points: that not everyone is good material to become a programmer, that not all bootcamps in Poland are created equal, and that bootcamps should not be seen as a substitute for a degree in computer science. His opinion was that bootcamps are valuable as means of quick introduction to the field and just the first step of many to follow. I am in complete agreement.
„Building high performance apps with Titanium”
Rene Pot is a representative of Appcelerator, a company based in the US, who for the past decade have been developing the Titanium app framework. He named several advantages of the framework, comparing it with more popular solutions with a similar purpose, like React Native and Flutter. There was a live coding demo, showcasing how easy it is to build mobile apps on Titanium.
What piqued my curiosity was what business model allowed the company to make a profit on a fully open-sourced product. It turned out what helps them keep their lights on are enterprise clients. Still, the company remains committed to the spirit of open source and makes all solutions available to the general public on GitHub.
I found this presentation a bit exotic, because I don’t know of any applications (whether big or small) built with this framework. Rene himself admitted that he hasn’t found any Titanium-based applications on the Polish market.
„Call me irresponsible if I ever crash on null or undefined in JavaScript or TypeScript”
A short but packed talk from Rafał Pocztarski on the subject of good coding practices to avoid common pitfalls — application errors and crashes.
What every JavaScript developer should keep in mind:
- Validate API responses. If we blindly assume the API would always return data in the proper format, we are taking a risk. Developers should always check and validate the data.
- Expect the unexpected. Always consider the edge cases.
- Eliminate bugs as early as possible. Common errors such as type error or null pointer exception can be avoided with the help of solutions like TypeScript, TSLint, Flow, or TravisCI.