Theo Bohnen

Hi, I'm Theo. I've been programming professionally for 8+ years and have loved it for many more. I'm extremely passionate about programming and all things related to software development. I love helping others become better programmers & problem solvers.

@tbohnenjnr tbohnen drivenalliance.com codeitright.co.za

Sisonke Rising

Moral Jera

Moral is currently a high school student who spends his nights and weekends learning Python, JavaScript and coding in general. Moral loves learning and sharing his passion with his friends.

@Moral_jera moralss sisonkerising.com

Sisonke Rising

Gabriel Fortuna

%w{code politics culture design ux}.each { |thing| puts "I’m about #{thing}" }

@gee_forr www.zero-one.io blog.gabrielfortuna.net

Rapid cross platform desktop app development using JavaScript and Electron

Despite the phenomenal popularity of web applications, there’s still a need for desktop applications that fit a certain class of functionality. The fine folks at Github have developed a framework that allows developers the ability to build cross platform desktop applications using JavaScript. Join me as we take a whirlwind tour of Electron and discover what is possible today, on the desktop, using JavaScript. We've seen JS in the browser, and then on the server. Is it time for JS on the desktop?

Kudakwashe Murungu

Software Developer with a wide range of expertise and interests around, designing and delivering of modern solutions using tools that best fit. He has worked across different stacks building Web Applications and Mobile apps.
Lately, he's been spending most of his free time journeying into the world of data analysis with Python. He hopes to become a "Data Scientist" one day ;)
Currently at Databuild, building awesome things there. @k_mvet

Getting started with React Native

Given how difficult it is to build performant hybrid mobile apps using web technologies for various platforms. React Native takes a different approach without promising you to write once and running everywhere. In this talk through how to build a React Native app using the shared knowledge but targeting different platforms.
In this talk I will walk through building a React Native app as we try to see how it solves this problem. Will cover the very basics, from how to get started all the way to avoid common performance pitfalls.

Garren Smith

Garren is a JavaScript fanatic. As a Apache CouchDB Project Management Committee member, he has spent the last few years working on Fauxton, the new CouchDB Web Interface as well as contributing to PouchDB. He is the founder of Red Comet Labs a software development consultancy and is a regular contributor to OpenSource code. Garren is also the creator of Classroom 7, an online course building application. He loves living under the African sun in Johannesburg.

@garrensmith

Managing complex user interfaces with component libraries

Having a consistent user interface across a large application is critical. Frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation are making it easier. But when designing a specific application, we need to take consistency one step further, and that's where component libraries come in.

Component libraries or design systems allow us to build a reference system for the usage and implementation of UI components. These components can then be used throughout your application in a consistent fashion. In this talk we'll introduce the concept of a component library; show you how to build a component library; demonstrate how to manage version updates and explain how to integrate the component library into your application with Webpack and NPM.

By the end of the talk, you will realise that this is the future and you won't be able to build you UI Components in any other way.

Ben Janecke

Hi I'm Ben, developer at Red Comet Labs.

My responsibilities range from translating designs into CSS and html, to building full web applications with React.js or Ember.js (although I prefer React). I have also been known to do backend work with Ruby and JavaScript, and have spent more time with SQL datastores than I would like to admit.

I started my career writing accident and traffic management systems for the South African government and project management systems for the Department of Public Works. I have since worked for a consultancy, travel companies Contiki and Go2Africa, the UK government, a fitness startup, a digital contract signing service and a BI suite.

I am passionate about clean, well-tested, understandable code and modern software processes in the post-agile world.

Managing complex user interfaces with component libraries

Having a consistent user interface across a large application is critical. Frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation are making it easier. But when designing a specific application, we need to take consistency one step further, and that's where component libraries come in.

Component libraries or design systems allow us to build a reference system for the usage and implementation of UI components. These components can then be used throughout your application in a consistent fashion. In this talk we'll introduce the concept of a component library; show you how to build a component library; demonstrate how to manage version updates and explain how to integrate the component library into your application with Webpack and NPM.

By the end of the talk, you will realise that this is the future and you won't be able to build you UI Components in any other way.

Patrick Kettner

Patrick Kettner a web developer, hacker, and dad from Seattle, Washington. He is the lead maintainer of Modernizr, a PM for Edge at Microsoft, and a new dad.

@patrickkettner patrickkettner

Making Modern Websites

It seems like new APIs for the web are released every week. It would be cool to be able to use them, but if you need to make websites for the average user, you won't be able to use them for years - right? Wrong.
Patrick will go over how creating feature rich and super fast front end applications, integrating over a dozen cutting edge web features, all while supporting even the oldest of web clients.

Simon Stewart

Founder of the JSinSA conference.
I help companies make and execute on great technical decisions.

@simonstewart

Moving the community forward

5 minutes still counts as a keynote doesn't it?

Duane McKibbin

Duane McKibbin is a software developer with 10 experience years working in various fields.
He started his career in Machine to machine communications (IOT before it was a buzzword) at Siemens as well as an electrical smart grid startup.
Duane now works at Entelect Software as a Team Lead. He's currently based at Ashburton Investments but previously worked on various projects in various industries including medical aid, debt consolidation and imports.
Duane has a real passion for web development, particularly front end JavaScript applications. He blogs at continuousdeveloper.com, mainly about CI and Continuous delivery. He loves to share his knowledge and learning with other developers and is always keen to learn something new.
On a more personal note, Duane is married and has an almost 2 year old daughter who keeps him very busy when not in the office.

continuousdeveloper.com Entelect Team Leader

Living on the edge.js

JavaScript is really powerful and we can get a lot done in it, but sometimes we hit its limits and we need to jump into something else like .net.

Thanks to a library called edge.js, we can have both, I.e. call .net code from js and vice versa.

I want to show how this works and take the attendees through a case where I implemented it in production.I'll give some practical advice as well as present a few gotchas to look out for.

Charlene Tshitoka

Charlene is a developer who enjoys doing a little bit of different things. She is quite passionate about solving people problems using software, so she'll wear any hat to simplify the way to production. And, that includes spending time around release management activities. Maybe one day, she will become a DevOps; if there is such a thing.
Charlene currently works at ThoughtWorks.

@charlymul

Feature toggle a JS App

Whether it's a new button, new page or even route to new functionality, applications are all about features. We build them so they can be released in due time. But at times we need to integrate these features in the production codebase as early as possible. And toggles can help achieve that. Feature toggles provide a way to add functionality while retaining full control on when it should be activated. This way, applications can encapsulate features that will become visible to users once ready or even turned on for only a limited set of them. JavaScript applications can also take advantage of the many techniques of feature toggling. So, in this session I will demonstrate how to toggle one using redaction. We'll discuss the benefits of redaction-based features toggling, the testing strategies, and also some gotchas.

Come and let's toggle a JS app!

Rishal Hurbans

Rishal is currently fulfilling the role of a Team/Technical Lead at Entelect. He is a software engineer designing and building solutions for various national and international blue chip clients. He has a passion for web architecture, mobile development, artificial intelligence, and design thinking methodologies. Rishal founded Prolific Idea in 2015 where innovation is cultivated through research and technology.

@RishalHurbans prolificidea.com rishal-hurbans

VR Interactions and JS

Is this real life? Given the growth in maturity of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, this talk aims to give a conceptual overview of emerging human-virtual interactions, and insights into a new world of research and problem solving. It is also and an introduction to the various technical options for developing VR software and interactions with JavaScript.

Katharine White

Katharine has been a developer at Investec for the past year and a half, where she currently works primarily in JS and ObjC. She is passionate about coding and continuously finding ways to improve her craft. She also really loves maths, especially graph theory (in which which she recently completed a masters degree). She fancies herself something of an activist, and is outspoken about her experiences as a transgender woman in tech.

@KatharineMWhite

Introduction to Promises

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of promises, and discuss when and how they are useful. I will then demo an example of how I've used them to get rid of messy chains of call-backs and produce something much cleaner. I will also demo a way of using promises, generators, let and for-of, all of which were introduced ES6, to provide an elegant way to chain asynchronous methods in a synchronous way.

Tsatsi Mahase

Tsatsi Mahase is a Software Developer at Thoughtworks. He studied Computer Systems Engineering and is passionate about programming. He has special interest in front end development which includes mobile and web application development. When he's not programming or learning something new, he spends most of his time sharing his knowledge.

@MahaseTsatsi github.com/Tsatsi tsatsi

Time traveling with Redux and ReactJS

One of the biggest challenges faced with single page applications is keeping state. Seemingly basic tasks such as undoing an action or navigating through an application while retaining state may suddenly require non trivial effort. How do we manage the ever changing state? How do we ensure that our state mutations are predictable? In this talk we will build a stateful application with redux and Reactjs that enables us to time travel by moving backward and forward in time through our application state. We will see how redux makes life easy and explore tools and resources to add to our toolboxes.

Jacques de Vos

I'm a software engineer who divides my time between coaching software development teams and building software products, mostly mobile. Most of my experience has been in developing crucial font-end applications in the financial industries: online trading, online banking, insurance and branch banking.

@jacdevos nreality.com

Hybrid vs Native - confessions of a native developer

Choosing the wrong mobile tech stack sets you up for a world of pain. But how do you select the right one from a plethora of current options?
As an iOS developer I am convinced that a carefully designed native app provides the best user experience. So why would we choose Ionic2/Angular2 on Cordova (a bleeding edge Hybrid JavaScript framework) for our latest mobile App? In this short talk I will share our thinking and experiences on the current landscape of mobile stack options.
I will introduce the contenders: Native (iOS and Android) vs Semi-Native (Xamarin and React Native) vs Hybrid (Ionic2/Angular2 on Cordova) vs Web. We will then go through some of the prominent tradeoffs between the different options: cost, reuse, single language, speed and user experience, device support, learning curve.
This should give you some (opinionated) guidelines to choosing the right mobile stack for your particular App.

Gergana Young

I am a software developer based in Johannesburg and working at BBD. I have worked in the software development field for over five years on various projects involving .NET, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS and more recently MeteorJS. Front end development has always been what I enjoyed doing most and I have recently become involved in UX and design as well. My interest in robotics increased recently when I started spending my weekends hacking my Star Wars droid.

@GerybBg

The adventures of Gery and BB-8 - Finding the droid you are looking for with cylon.js

BB-8 by Sphero is a bluetooth enabled droid based on the character from the new Star Wars movie. BB-8 can be controlled from an app on your phone via bluetooth, however using cylon.js you can take full control of your droid. I would like to show you how easy it is to turn your droid into the coolest droid in the galaxy.

Mike Geyser

Mike Geyser is a programmer at BBD, specialising in designing and building for the web platform. He's been hacking on the web since geocities was a thing, has a long-lived love affair with javascript, and has (almost) come to terms with the fact that he will never have a programmer beard. While he has worked on some interesting large-scale enterprise applications, it is the challenges of the public web that really appeals to him - having earned his stripes on high volume transactional websites. He works primarily in javascript, C# and (unfortunately) java, and seldom refers to himself in the third person.

@mikegeyser

Riding the Angular 2 wave

The imminent release of Angular 2 is poised like a tsunami, ready to take the World Wide Web by storm, and will inevitably drag the entire JavaScript ecosystem along for the ride. Angular 2 sees itself less as a framework, and more as a platform on which to craft your single page applications. This session will uncover the cornerstone of an angular application by illustrating the new web-component based design, improved dependency injection, and unidirectional data flow. It will also demonstrate the routing model, templating and practical debugging. Everything needed to kick start a project, and start riding the Angular 2 wave.