Five Popular JavaScript Tech Talks: JWT, Async/Await, Arrays/Objects and Jest

Speakers from companies like Slack, IBM, Okta, Docker and Intrinsic come together twice a year to give highly-technical talks about JavaScript, software and culture, delivered live and distributed for free online.

Below, five popular talks about JavaScript from the last event that have just been published:

Conversational Interfaces, JavaScript and W3C

Tomomi Imura of Slack discusses the shift in application design from web and mobile interfaces to the expanding fields of bots and AI. How will your application interact with these new interfaces, whether the end consumer is a human or an API?

JSON Web Tokens Suck

Randall Degges of Okta gave a comprehensive and controversial talk about how JWTs are inferior to session cookies. He covers recent JWT security vulnerabilities, OWASP recommendations for local storage, regulatory compliance and potential CSRF issues.

Okta Developers recently hosted the developer-focused Iterate conference, and you can find those videos on the Okta Developers YouTube channel.

The Long Road to Async/Await in JavaScript

Thomas Hunter II walks us through the history and future of asynchronous code in JS, covering callbacks, promises, generators/yield and async/await. His analysis includes error handling, promise rejection, browser support, code refactoring and API promisification.

Hooray for Arrays! Tips and Tricks for JavaScript’s Best Object

Erin McKean of IBM starts with the basics of JS arrays and their helper functions, as well as the catches and gotchas that trip up entry-level as well as more experienced developers. Those new to JavaScript will get a great overview of how arrays are handled; more experienced developers will be introduced to edge cases with nulls, length, and new ES6 features.

Jest as a Platform

Rogelio Guzman of Docker discusses Jest, an easy-to-setup JavaScript testing framework, and how to cherry-pick testing features and integrating your test tooling on top of Jest. Using existing legacy test frameworks and codebases, cherry-picked Jest features can simplify your testing infrastructure without rewriting it.

Next steps:

• Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing the remainder of the videos to our YouTube channel.
• If you’d like to attend in person, check out our conferences in Ottawa and San Francisco.