Full Stack Toronto Conference 2014

We at IBM are not strangers to large, well capitalized conferences. As things go in the conference-industrial complex, it is a big deal when one of your keynote speakers is Kevin Spacey, or Imagine Dragons entertain you after hours. So to say that the first Full Stack Toronto Conference was on the opposite side of the spectrum would be an understatement.

How about ‘no food’, ‘no drinks except coffee in the morning’, and ‘no entertainment’ of any kind except finding parking around Ryerson University building? OK, not fair, there was a get together in the nearby Irish pub the first night that I didn’t go to because I was tired.

This conference was really just a meetup making the next step. And on a weekend. Starting on 8:45am. Who does that? Our keynote speaker Anila Arthanari, Director Of Software Development at Infusionsoft, wore a t-shirt ‘I am not a morning person’ expressing the mood of most of the audience. By all accounts, this was supposed to be a flop.

And yet. When you peel the layers of conference pageantry, what remains is the kernel of it all – good talks. When talks are good, people will not mind walking out to a nearby panini store to buy lunch, or walk a block up the Church Street to get a Starbucks hit. Nothing matters if talks are good.

And they were. We had multiple tracks, and I could not go to all the talks, but those I attended were very informative, thought-provoking and immanently applicable. After every talk I had tons of things I wrote down to try after, or catch up on. So what were my key takeaways from the conference?

1. Lots of people use Angular.js. If you need a client side MVC, you can do worse, with a caveat that version 2.0 is on the slowly approaching horizon, and to say that migration will be interesting would be an understatement.
2. More and more people use Browserify over RequireJS. Put off by weird configuration syntax, and feeling the need easier code reuse in the case of Node.js, people seem to prefer to just ‘require’ their modules. It makes it easier to go back and forth. I am definitely going to try using it soon. This blog might help as well.
3. Micro-services are everywhere. In the tongue-in-cheek ‘Show Us Your Stack’ track, multiple presenters described their journey from monoliths to micro-service systems. I like how people are now past the hype and deep in the gory details on standing up such systems in practice. Many were openly asking the audience for their feedback and red flags if they see any.
4. Not everybody uses Angular.js. I know this is a contradiction, but people who value control and being able to grow into a client side MVC still value Backbone.js and its modular approach. If anything, Angular.js 2.0 promises to be more modular and less arrogant, for the lack of a better word. Here is hoping that in the future, considering Angular.JS will not be such an ‘all or nothing’ dilemma.
5. Isomorphic and ‘federation of single-page apps’ is a thing. I thought I will be the only one pushing for rendering stuff on both the server and the client using the same templates, but Matthew Conlen from New York Data Company talked about exactly such an approach. Personally, I find it funny that people are happy to partition the API space into micro-services, but don’t feel the need to do the same with the Web apps. As the system grows, a single one page app providing all the UI is going to be the bottleneck of the system. Which is ironic, because user interfaces are the most transient and need to be evolved at a rapid pace. In essence, we are creating a system where API services can move at a rapid speed, but the UI is one big ball of MVC mud.
6. React can help with isomorphic. Once you decide rendering on both sides of the fence is important to you, React is an attractive proposition because it can do exactly that, and plays nice with Node.js.
7. Internet Of Things is still in its infancy. It seems like we all feel this weird excitement over turning the lights with Node.js apps and sending messages to robots and receiving MQTT messages that it is now 24C in the room. It is apparent that all this stuff will matter one day and great things will come, but I don’t see what to do with it today other than marvel in the possibilities. I guess once somebody does something really awesome with IoT, we will all slap our collective foreheads and say ‘but of course, so elegant’.

By the way, yours truly presented as well. You can see my slides up on Slideshare, and the source code of my demo on GitHub. You may find it interesting – I got Angular.js to fit into the micro-service driven Web UI, use normal URLs (no horrible hashes or hash bangs), and share a common header with other pages. I also demonstrated SSO using Facebook as the identity provider, lively UI using Web Sockets and isomorphic approach using Dust.js rendered on both client and server. The best part was when an audience member posted a todo into the demo running live on Bluemix, and his entry popped up on screen as I was demoing it. Audience participation, live demo, unexpected proof that the code actually works as designed – priceless!

So there you have it – you can make the attendees feed themselves, only give them coffee in the morning (what is life even), and dispense with most of the usual conference perks, and they will still come if the talks are good. I would say that the first FullStack TO conference focused on the most important thing, and succeeded. Good talks first, creature comforts to follow – good priorities in my book. Looking forward to the next year!

© Dejan Glozic, 2014