Connect JS :: October 17-18, 2014

Aaron Saunders @aaronksaunders CEO of Clearly Innovative Inc

Backbone Sync Adapter for Cloud Services Using the backbone model/collection framework, one can seamlessly integrate Titanium Alloy with REST API datastore. In this session, we will discuss approaches for integrating Appcelerator Cloud Services using a Backbone Sync Adapter.

Admiral Ackbar @Ackbar A member of the amphibious Mon Calamari species, Ackbar was the foremost military commander of the Rebel Alliance who led major combat operations against the Galactic Empire.

Avoiding Traps in Intergalactic Space Battles The last thing you want to happen when battling Imperial forces in space is to realize you're in an ambush and have to shout "It's a trap!" to your advancing forces. In this session, we'll discuss how to detect both deep space and geostationary orbit ambush tactics by the Imperial army.

Andrew Zuercher @bahzuercher Full-stack developer at Make And Build.

Using Promises to Get Out of Callback Misery Many javascript frameworks make use of the standard nodejs callback mechanism while some newer frameworks have promises built in. We'll cover how to consume existing implementations as well as how to roll your own implemenation from scratch. We'll also dive into how to retrofit existing callback based code into a promise based implementation.
Moving from PHP to a Node.js Full Stack CMS KeystoneJS is a relatively new CMS that allows js developers to quickly implement a solution using a tech stack they feel comfortable with. Imagine that you could drop your wordpress site and use a full stack CMS that uses modern web frameworks and a nodejs back end to swap out PHP for javascript. If you have been developing javascript applications, you can use the following familiar tools: nodejs, express, mongo, yeoman (with bootstrap generators as well as support for LESS), and your favorite templating engine - handlebars, jade, mustache. We'll cover everything from setup, implementation and deployment.

Brandy Porter @chickerbp Brandy leads the Design team at Big Nerd Ranch, a company known for its immersive bootcamps, corporate training and elegantly designed mobile apps. The Nerds are fluent in multiple operating systems and languages, including HTML5, Android, iOS, and Windows 8.

In addition to leading the growing design team at Big Nerd Ranch, she also teaches holistic design practices for major mobile operating systems, and has delivered courses to designers, developers and content strategists from Fortune 100 companies in multiple countries. She has also spoken at conferences such as SXSW and for Microsoft's Virtual Academy/Channel 9.

Brandy has spent much of her career creating award-winning solutions for top consumer brands across all manner of media. She has created results-driven interactive experiences on multiple platforms and devices, and has also taught interaction design at corporate and collegiate levels with a focus on user behavior, intuitive design and critical thinking.

Make It Work Struggling with what your designer actually means? Misunderstanding your developer's needs? Frustrating your client with poor team communication? In this session, Brandy Porter explores the two mindsets of designers and developers, suggests removing the "fence" between the two contributors, and offers support for fostering collaboration and ownership among designers and developers equally. The session will explore the issue at hand, and offer solutions and techniques to make your next project run more smoothly.

Brent Schooley @brentschooley Brent is a Developer Evangelist for Twilio representing the Philadelphia metro. He is a software developer who has been working with Microsoft technologies since 2004. His interests include client and mobile application development and user experience design with a recent emphasis on cross-platform mobile applications and client-side JavaScript frameworks. Other platforms he has worked with include WPF, Silverlight, Windows Forms, Windows Phone, and Windows 8. Brent is the author of Designing for Windows 8, a Windows 8 design primer from Apress. He is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Development as well as a Xamarin MVP.

Getting Fired Up About Ember.js Ember.js is a new client-side application framework that makes it very easy to get a lot accomplished with very little code. Once you understand the basics of how Ember.js handles MVC (it's a little different from server-side MVC!) and routing, you will enjoy the productivity boosts the framework offers you. In this session I'll introduce you to Ember.js basics, how to handle data, and how to use Handlebars templating to build your application. Upon leaving the session, you'll be ready to join Groupon and Square and many other companies using this hot front-end framework!

Brian Rinaldi @remotesynth Brian Rinaldi is the Developer Content Manager at Telerik where he manages the Telerik Developer Connection. Brian is a frequent speaker and author. Brian founded the popular site Flippin' Awesome (now the Modern Web) and is co-editor of the Mobile Web Weekly newsletter.

8-Bit Game Music with Web Audio API 8-bit gaming and music is back – big time! Whether you are creating a soundtrack for a game, writing chiptunes or just having fun, you’ll want to recreate that classic sound. In this session we’ll look at how you can create audio in the browser using oscillators with the Web Audio API and JavaScript. We’ll also explore the capabilities of a library called Band.js.

Chris Aquino @radishmouse As Director of Front-End Engineering, Chris Aquino leads Big Nerd Ranch’s web team, which specializes in cross-platform app development and training for Open Web technologies. He is also the author and senior instructor of Big Nerd Ranch's "Cross-Platform JavaScript Apps" training course. With more than a decade of development experience, his skills and expertise range from Java and Python on the server to all things JavaScript, in the browser and beyond.

Before joining Big Nerd Ranch nearly three years ago, Aquino worked as a software engineer for Monumental Interactive. For the last four years, he has volunteered for the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) on the sustainability committee.

Aquino graduated from Georgia Tech with a bachelor of science in technology and culture with a focus on computational media and cognitive science.

Building Blocks for Isomorphic JavaScript Applications With Node.js came the dream of writing a single codebase and having it run on the client as well as the server. Now, a number of tools and libraries are helping us make this a reality. Soon, it will be the preferred way to build for the web. In this talk, we will look at tools and techniques for building Isomorphic JavaScript apps and discuss the reasons why you may want to do this for your next website or application. We'll walk through an application built with React and Browserify. In addition, we'll examine how this style of web development works with the design process.

Chris Halaschek @chalaschek Chris Halaschek is a full-stack engineer and entrepreneur who has been building real-time, web-based systems for the past 10+ years. Currently, he is the CTO of Voxa, an email intelligence platform for sales teams. Prior to Voxa, Chris was the CTO of San Francisco based game developer, HashGo and CTO at financial services firm, Clados Management.

Chris holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. He additionally earned his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Georgia.

Famo.us: The Future of the Mobile Web? Native has won. The mobile web is dead. Or is it? Armed with sexy demos powered by a 3D physics and rendering engine, a new JavaScript framework called Famo.us has caught the eye of both developers and investors. This has people asking once again… what does the future hold for mobile web development? Come explore the history of the more popular mobile web frameworks of the past and participate in a deep dive into what has been positioned as the future of mobile web development, Famo.us. Learn what it is, how it works and see it in action.

Chris Morrow @_ChrisMorrow I'm a Senior UI Developer at Soltech, Inc. I've worked in the web development field for over 16 years. I've used a number of web technologies including Flash, Flex, Javascript, jQuery, AJAX, and HTML5. Throughout my career I have maintained focus on the UI and the user experience.

When I'm not coding I enjoy tennis, a good craft beer, or hanging out with my wonderful wife and two kids.

I have led internal training at a number of companies and enjoy sharing what I've learned with others. I also was once a Javascript and Flash trainer at New Horizons for a short spell in the late 90s.

My entire career I've worked in Atlanta. I've worked with a number of enterprises including IBM, Georgia-Pacific, and IHG. I've also worked for digital marketing agencies with clients including Home Depot, NYSE, The NBA, Georgia Lottery, Graco, Americas Mart, BeautyRest, and Accu-Chek.

Debugging JavaScript: From Zero to Hero During our time together I will share how to debug JavaScript in the browser console and JavaScript best practices for easier debugging. I will use Chrome, Firefox, and yes; even Internet Explorer. Topics included will be setting breakpoints, coded breakpoints, watches, console.log(), http requests, useful console extensions, and console programming.

Clint Ayres @jurassix Full stack web developer for ICE in Atlanta. Over the last year I've built, with the help of a great team, three high profile web applications, including the newly branded NYSE. I'm passionate about craftsmanship and community in web development.

Advanced React.js React is a library by FaceBook for building user interfaces. In this talk we'll explore React using real world examples. Examine complex UI's and how managing view state can quickly complect your design and data consistency. We'll also look at how other languages solve these problems. Finally, we'll see how layering the right technologies together we can simplify our solutions when building dynamic Web UI's.

Dennis Hurst @dennishurst Dennis Hurst has 14 years of experience in the Application Security industry and has been a developer for over 25 years of development experience. He has worked with developers around the world improving the security of their application and was the original developer of WebInspect (now and HP product).

Mr. Dennis Hurst is a highly respected security expert with unprecedented expertise in the area of application security and the integration of security into all aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). His broad experience in security, application development, product management, and IT Operations have given him the knowledge and experience to work with many Fortune 500 companies around the globe implementing successful application security programs.

Mr. Hurst has also been influential in many industry organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance, the Open Web Application Security Project, and other industry groups. He is a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), where he co-wrote the Application Security section of v1 & v2 of the CSA guidelines.

Securing AngularJS Applications AngularJS provides an outstanding way to create highly responsive and portable applications, however as with most web applications security can be challenging. This talk will present a practical approach to designing, developing, and testing a secure AngularJS application and the RESTful web services that support it.

Edwin Huertas @edwinRVA Edwin currently serves as CEO of Shockoe.com, LLC, a Mobile Development & Consulting firm, with offices in Richmond, VA and Quito Ecuador. Edwin is a hands-on executive officer known for strategic and focused approach, with extensive accolades for limiting risk, creating lean teams, and establishing creative strategies for optimizing internal operations, financial returns and external customer service. With a solid software engineering background, and over 18 years of experience, Edwin has applied his extensive knowledge to a wide variety of industries including: Education, Retail, Real Estate, Staffing, among others, earning Shockoe the Richmond Companies to Watch 2013 award.

Workshop: Building Native Mobile Apps with JavaScript using Titanium Bring your laptop! Use your JavaScript skills to build native iOS and Android apps! This is a 1/2 day workshop specifically designed to get you up and running with Titanium and build feature-rich applications! We'll install the latest Titanium Developer and iOS SDK - then create a project in Titanium Developer and run it in the simulator to verify your setup. Basic JavaScript experience is necessary for this session; please complete a basic JavaScript course or book before attending.

(This workshop requires separate registration and is not included in the main conference fee)

Erica Stanley @ericastanley Full stack web developer for ICE in Atlanta. Over the last year I've built, with the help of a great team, three high profile web applications, including the newly branded NYSE. I'm passionate about craftsmanship and community in web development.

Developling for Wearable Devices In this session we will discuss the tools, resources and best practices for developing for wearable devices.

Fokke Zandbergen @FokkeZB Based in The Netherlands, Fokke is an active contributor to the international Titanium community. As a Titan he's a developer advocate of the Titanium platform and co-leads the Dutch user group in Amsterdam. He's also a Titanium Certified Instructor and likes to speak from what he learns building apps himself.

The Ultimate Titanium CLI Toolchain Though Studio has improved a lot, the CLI has as well - allowing you to use your own favourite editor instead and even increase your productivity by using some community-developed tools like TiShadow, gitTio, Grunt, TiCons, Ti-Inspector, STSS and many more.

Gordon Hall @sp0rkyd0rky I am a Senior Software Engineer at BitPay, dividing my time between developing our core product and contributing to our various open source projects. I am passionate about using technology as a means for protecting personal freedom and deprecating the necessity of authority and centralization in all facets of society.

Decentralized Consensus and the Death of the Server Trust nobody unless it's everybody. Gordon will be discussing the problems with the centralization of information and leading an interactive demonstration of how to implement a completely decentralized peer-to-peer voting system using Node.js.

Jae Lee @leejaew Jae is the founder of Movable Ads, an Austin start-up that focuses on creating mobile first user experience through the use of mobile and wearable technology. By delivering personalized messages, Movable Ads empower consumers to engage in a real-time conversation which leads to a more intimate connection with brands and products.

As a software engineer and advocate, he currently contributes to the Austin tech community by hosting a local meetup on mobile app development. Prior, Jae has lived in Tunis Tunisia where he served as a volunteer lecturer for 2 years at a local university teaching web programming.

Building Proximity-Based Retail Experience for Cross-Platform Devices Our world is driven by exploration. It is a basic human intuition that has given us the ability to form decisions, beliefs, and reasoning. We can encourage discovery and build more intimate relationship with consumers through proximity-based technologies. Whether you’re attending a baseball game in the stands or watching it on TV, it is a shared experience. This session will share various use cases that leverage this to create a lasting and meaningful process for consumers.

Billy Hoffman @zoompf Billy Hoffman is the founder and CTO of Zoompf Inc, a provider of web performance products and services. Previously Billy was a web security researcher at SPI Dynamics and managed a research team at HP. He can open a Coke can without using his hands.

Optimizing front-end web performance like a rockstar Slow sites suck. No one gets to see all your web app's awesomeness, because they looked a blank screen for 3 seconds and decided to go elsewhere. And while I'm sire your NoSQL + node.js + [framework of the week] backend is amazing, what about your front-end? Where the real bottlenecks are? There are some surprisingly simple optimization we can do to our image, CSS, JavaScript, and fonts. But don't confuse "simple" with "easy" because even big sites like the BBC and the Twitter are making mistakes. In this talk, I'll show you not only the optimizations you should be making, but where other people get them wrong. Better still, I'll also show you to automate these optimizations into processes, so you know everything is always getting optimized.

Jason Kneen @jasonkneen Freelance Web/App/Mobile Developer as @bouncingfish • Speaker • Creator of @tweet4me, @buffer4me • TCAD + TCD Certified Developer/Instructor • Titanium Titan

Adventures in Cross-Platform Talk about my experience developing cross-platform apps with Titanium from dealing with commercial aspects, pricing, billing, to dealing with designers, common issues / challenges, managing expectations. I also talk about techniques to make cross-platform easier, including best-practices, developing common elements like basecontrollers in Alloy, using Alloy Templates and even developing custom alloy tags, demonstrating a full-blown replacement TabGroup tag that works on Android.

Jason Reece @jason_reece For more than two years, Jason Reece has worked as a software engineer at Big Nerd Ranch, specializing in front-end development in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. His expertise also includes responsive web development. A notable project to date was the relaunch of Big Nerd Ranch's website, which Reece was the lead developer in constructing.

Before joining Big Nerd Ranch in 2012, Reece worked for the art school Creative Circus. Reece had a number of different roles at Creative Circus, including administrator, student and teacher. Since shifting from employee to student, Reece's work has revolved around computers ever since. He also served as an instructor at Creative Circus teaching an introduction to HTML and CSS class.

How OCD is your CSS? Learn best practices for writing reusable and scalable CSS with software developer Jason Reece of Big Nerd Ranch. Intended for developers of all levels who are familiar with the basics of Sass, Reece will share the fundamental concepts of OOCSS and SMACSS and discuss how to use css-burrito to help organize your code. The session will introduce the css-burrito components pattern, outline a suggested style guide and share must-have Sass snippets for any project.

Jason Weathersby @jasonweathersby Jason Weathersby is a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, evangelizing Firefox OS. He is also a committer on the BIRT project at the Eclipse Foundation, and has co-authored several books and written many articles on BIRT integration. He is a proponent of HTML5, the Open Web and Open Source and is a regular contributor to the Mozilla Hacks blog. Jason has over 20 years experience in the software development field, ranging from real time process control to business intelligence software.

HTML5 for the Mobile Web - Firefox OS Firefox OS is an open source operating system for mobile phones designed entirely around HTML5, Javascript, CSS and open web standards. By leveraging the inherent advantages of web development and giving developers access to hardware through web standards, we can make an open and affordable mobile web a reality. In this talk Jason Weathersby from Mozilla will show how Firefox OS works, how to build and debug apps for it, and how end users will benefit from this open alternative to other platforms.

Jeff Haynie @jhaynie Jeff is Co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator. Jeff is a long-time serial entrepreneur, technologist and blogger. Previously, Jeff was Co-founder and CTO of Vocalocity, a software provider in the communications arena and before that, CTO of eHatchery, a digital incubator and off-shoot of Bill Gross’ idealab!. Jeff has worked on numerous standard committees such as IETF and W3C as well as core contributor to a number of important open source technologies such as JBoss and OpenVXI. Jeff served with distinction in the U.S. Navy.

Piloting Hyperdrive Spacecraft through Asteroids Best Practices for Piloting Hyperdrive Spacecraft. How to fly a large spacecraft with a furry co-pilot and avoid Imperial recon patrols.

John Gould @AvatarJohn John has been in Nashville since 1995, developing business applications and engaging in Business Intelligence projects for large firms throughout the US. He started Avatar Software as a boutique custom development shop in 2003 and has expanded the company's scope in recent years to include mobile development and web application development, primarily utilizing the Durandal JavaScript framework.

John started Codex Labs in 2012 with Andrew McElroy to bring enterprise-level Appcelerator Titanium training to the Southeast. Subsequently, John became interested in developing mobile games with Titanium and Lanica's Platino game development engine. He is currently working with Andrew on developing a new game development training course using this ecosystem.

John lives with his family in Franklin, TN and dreams of dragging the substantial, yet very traditional, Nashville entertainment industry into the world of game development, even if it has to be kicking and screaming. He's a diehard Vanderbilt football fan and loves to encourage children to engage in music and programming, especially his son and daughter, who amaze him daily.

Enterprise-Level 2D Game Development with Titanium & Platino The session will touch on the Platino mobile game development engine specifics, but will also delve into how to organize and develop a truly Enterprise-level game with Titanium. Included: How to combine Platino and Alloy to set up a game loop and how beginning programmers can get into game development with this easy and fun platform.

Jonathan Martin @nybblr With more than seven years experience in software development and three years in commercial web development, Jonathan Martin is currently a front-end and back-end software developer and instructor at Big Nerd Ranch. He makes the world a better place for consulting clients with front-end development using Rails. He also bores knowledge-hungry students with the "wats" of JavaScript.

Martin graduated summa cum laude from Georgia Tech with a degree in computer science. He has experience with Rails and front-end development, architecting and implementing systems with a focus on maintainability and ﬂexibility. He teaches Big Nerd Ranch’s immersive bootcamp on Cross Platform JavaScript Apps with HTML5.

Teach JS About Aesthetics with Machine Learning Move over Number 5: Artificial Intelligence is a relic of 1986. It's 2014: the era of Machine Learning + Big Data. Machine learning helps power everything from Google Now to the lowly OS X Preview app — but you don't have to be a Prolog or eCommerce geek to harness its power! In this session, software developer and instructor Jonathan Martin of Big Nerd Ranch, will give you a whirlwind tour of the fundamental concepts and algorithms in machine learning, then explore a front-end application: selecting the "best" photos to feature on our photo sharing site. Don't expect mathematically laborious derivations of SVM kernels or the infinite VC dimension of Neural Nets, but we will gain enough intuition to make informed compromises (thanks to the No Free Lunch theorem, everything is a compromise) in our pursuit of aesthetically-intelligent machines.

Ket Majmudar @ketan Ket has been freelancing as a web developer/designer for 14 years, starting out in design and moving more towards web application development. In late 2010 he began creating mobile apps using Titanium. His apps, either built internally or as part of contracting for other companies, include solutions for the SCI-FI-LONDON International Film Festival, Surrey Police & Radio Taxis (London Black Cabs). He also won "Most Inspiring" as part of a team for T-10, held by NASA's 2013 'Space Apps Challenge'. A Titan & organiser of the London Titanium User Group, he plays rock bass guitar & dabbles in 3D photography when not building apps. Currently living and working near London, UK.

Implementing an Awesome UI/UX Strategy In this session, we'll take a closer look at implementing a UI/UX strategy in a small team. We'll do a case study of how we built an awesome UI/UX for T-10, an app which won an award for the NASA Space Apps Challenge

Kristin Marsicano @kristinmars Kristin Marsicano is an Android developer, team manager, and instructor at Big Nerd Ranch. She is passionate about software development, learning, and the intersection of the two. Throughout the years Kristin has designed and implemented mobile applications in industry, researched and published on the usability and human factors aspects of mobile interfaces in academia, served as a consultant for Fortune 100 wireless carriers, and even participated in Google's exploration of a visual programming language for Android for use in Computer Science education.

Make It Work Struggling with what your designer actually means? Misunderstanding your developer's needs? Frustrating your client with poor team communication? In this session, Brandy Porter explores the two mindsets of designers and developers, suggests removing the "fence" between the two contributors, and offers support for fostering collaboration and ownership among designers and developers equally. The session will explore the issue at hand, and offer solutions and techniques to make your next project run more smoothly.

Lance Gleason @lgleasain Lance Gleason has been a computer nut ever since his dad bought him a computer when he was a kid. After nearly a decade as a Java developer for companies like Kodak, CNN, and GE, he decided to end his addiction to heavy inheritance, static typing, and coding without tests. These days, he practices clean Ruby living with lots of well-tested code, class composition, and fun dynamic languages as a developer/startup CTO for hire with extensive experience in data science and committer on open source projects such as the Passbook-iOS, Asari and Active Asari Gems. He is known to practice interspecies pair (purr) programming with his orange tabby, Allie, and when he's not writing code, you will find him diving with sharks, trekking through Chernobyl, sampling wine, cheering on the Springboks or perfecting his biltong recipe.

Using JS to Prototype for the Internet of Things Rapid prototyping for Google Glass, Wear and other wearables using JavaScript on Android.

Mary Rose Cook @maryrosecook I write code, make music, work at Hacker School and live in New York City. I’ve made two games: Pistol Slut and Empty Black. I’ve made a micro framework for JavaScript games: Coquette. I’ve made a programming language for children: Isla. I’ve spoken at JSConf, EmpireJS, Front-Trends, BerlinJS and BrooklynJS.

Implementing Git to Understand it If approached from the inside out, Git is beautiful and easy to use. In this talk, I'll explain the simple data structures that underpin Git. I'll walk through some JavaScript code that manipulates those data structures to implement add, commit, checkout, merge, push and pull.

Micah Wedemeyer @micahwedemeyer Micah is a consultant and partner in The Agile League, a web development and design agency based in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves combining entrepreneurship with hacking, design and practical product management. He also built and runs Obsidian Portal, sort of a “basecamp for Dungeons and Dragons”.

When he’s not working on projects for The Agile League, Micah is practicing stunt kiting, skateboarding, kayaking, mountain biking, and co-hosting a weekly Dungeons and Dragons podcast, Haste.

The Future of JavaScript: ES5, ES6, and Beyond Learn about the history of JavaScript, how it has changed, and where it is going. Learn the timelines for adoption of the new features, both in the browsers and in other environments like Node. Finally, learn how you can use the advanced features today, even in environments that don't natively support them.

Michael Cohen @planetcohen Michael is a Senior Architect at GoDaddy, directing the company's core UX technologies. For over 25 years, he’s worked with numerous platforms and languages in both small startups and large enterprises. As an independent web-development consultant, he specialized in Ruby-on-Rails and Javascript development. A lengthy stint at Microsoft found him responsible for key components of MSN's small business and commerce hosting services, additionally serving development lead for Microsoft's Commerce Server Product. He was also Director of Product Design and Engineering Manager at eShop - the eCommerce pioneer that Microsoft acquired in 1996.

Getting Enterprises to Embrace Javascript or: I was an Apprentice Padawan Javascript used to be seen as the cute apprentice padawan, good for little more than presenting trivial animations to the client and certainly not suited for serious computing. It turns out, that unassuming kid is as strong as a Jedi Knight, incredibly expressive, and viable for development on the server, for mobile, and for sophisticated rich-client apps. But not everyone got the memo about this wunderkind and is willing to invite him to play; many enterprises are still unwilling to consider Javascript for projects, opting to stick with the well-known clan of Java, C#/.NET, etc. So, how do we, the Javascript community, change enterprise perception that Javascript is not ready to play with the big kids? In this talk, we’ll look at the issues folks have with Javascript and solid ways to address them.

Michael Johnson @bluekayaks Senior Front End at Huge Inc.

I've been kayaking for about five years now. I love the focus of being on the water, planning your next moves while working in your current one. I love the teamwork. You're never on the river alone, and the safety of others is your responsibility.

It's a sport that can take you to wonderful places you'd never see otherwise. Little River Canyon, Tallulah Gorge, the Chattooga, rural Ecuador.

Angular Animation Angular gives us some pretty powerful tools to add motion to our applications. But how does it work? We'll start by reviewing some of the basics of CSS animation, then talk about the tools ng-animate gives us refine and time how content is displayed.

Natalie Kozlowski @NRKozlowski Natalie serves as the front-end developer and designer at CodeGuard. She not only creates usable and engaging media in Illustrator and Photoshop, but brings them to life using the latest in scalable front-end web technologies. A graduate of Michigan State University in Professional Writing, Natalie was the Creative Director for the State News, supervised the development team and oversaw all design. Previously at the Nebo Agency, a leading interactive marketing group, she developed easy-to-use custom web applications and produced elegantly designed websites. In her spare time she enjoys biking, t-shirt design, learning to speak new languages, and constructing massive wooden letters in Helvetica Bold.

How to Interact with your Front-End Developer This talk critically examines the relationship between front-end developers and back-end developers on a project. Where are points of tension found? Where does frustration happen? Where do things go right? This presentation is given from the perspective of a front-end developer and designer. Whether you write Ruby code, PHP, Python, Java, or any other kind of language, this talk will give recommendations on how you can interact with your designer or front-end developer the best, keep everyone involved happy, and keep projects moving forward.

Nigel Alford @alforddesign Nigel Alford is a podcast host, writer, and javascript project lead. He's a self-taught developer, who began his computing career traversing ms-dos commands as an Atlanta youth.

Workshop: JavaScript Developer's Toolchain This is a hands-on workshop. Please bring your laptop! This workshop will help get you up to speed on modern tools and techniques for building web apps. This session focuses on JavaScript not in the browser, but on the server and command line. We'll explain and work with tools such as nodejs, npm, grunt, bower, yeoman and others. This is a fast-paced session to get you setup and working with the tools that JavaScript devs use to build webapps.

(This workshop requires separate registration and is not included in the main conference fee)

Patrick Mueller @pmuellr Patrick Mueller is an IBMer working in the Raleigh, NC area. He has been using node.js for a few years now, starting with contributing debug tooling to the Apache Cordova project. Currently he is a developer advocate for IBM's Bluemix PaaS product, based on the open source Cloud Foundry project.

Node.js on a PaaS You can run node.js applications today on a variety of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments, including Azure, Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Nodejitsu, etc. Running on a PaaS makes it easy to host and scale your application on the public internet. But, as Uncle Ben says, with great power comes some contraint. Or maybe that was someone else. You won't get as many knobs and dials to turn when you use a PaaS compared to some other deployment stories. But you can generally live without them, just fine. This talk will cover the awesome parts about running on a PaaS, and how to deal with some of the constraints that come along with it.

Patrick Seda @pxtrick Patrick is a Mobile Application Architect consultant and has created apps for all sizes of clients, including several Fortune 500 clients. Currently the Technical Lead at Propelics, he helps define and orchestrate all Enterprise app development. Formerly a Professional Services Architect for Appcelerator, he is a Titanium fanboy who loves contributing back to the community.

Don't Fear the Hybrid When choosing Titanium as a development tool, the biggest appeal is that your apps will be fully native without the pain of using other hybrid-based solutions. This talk will show you how to incorporate existing JavaScript graphing libraries into your Titanium app for mind-blowing charting capabilities.

Pete Hodgson @ph1 Pete is a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He helps teams get more awesome at delivering maintainable software at a sustainable pace, using agile practices like test-driven design, pairing and continuous delivery. After horrible experiences with javascript in the early 2000s Pete saw the light and fell in love with this quirky little language while leading a team building a pure-JavaScript single-page mobile banking application. He was also an early contributor to the Calatrava framework.

Theory and Practice of Functional Reactive JavaScript The re-emergence of functional programming coincides nicely with the JavaScript renaissance. But where does the UI fit in? In this talk we'll cover the core concepts of Functional Reactive Programming while learning a practical application of them using Bacon.js. You'll learn how to build user interface components in a clear, declarative style by modeling both user interaction and back-end processing using one clean abstraction: streams of events.

Pratik Patel @prpatel Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based startup TripLingo. He’s also an author, speaker, and consultant helping technologists build great apps, and business people make the most of technology. After many years in the big corporate world in places such as New York, London and Hong Long, he’s in the startup space now and hacks iOS, Android, Java, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl. You can follow him on twitter at @prpatel.

Workshop: JavaScript Developer's Toolchain This is a hands-on workshop. Please bring your laptop! This workshop will help get you up to speed on modern tools and techniques for building web apps. This session focuses on JavaScript not in the browser, but on the server and command line. We'll explain and work with tools such as nodejs, npm, grunt, bower, yeoman and others. This is a fast-paced session to get you setup and working with the tools that JavaScript devs use to build webapps.

(This workshop requires separate registration and is not included in the main conference fee)

Raju Gandhi @looselytyped I am a Software Craftsman with over a decade of experience building Web Applications and Enterprise Software and I love to build great software.

AngularJS Bootcamp I In this session, we will take a look at Angular - a new MVC framework by Google. We will discuss some of the terminology that Angular offers, and see how we can use that to develop highly interactive, dynamic web applications. Angular embraces HTML and CSS, allowing you to extend HTML towards your application, and uses plain JavaScript which makes your code easy to reuse, and test. This is an intro level talk. It is targeted towards developers who are curious about Angular and want to learn about the fundamental features and concepts in Angular.
AngularJS Bootcamp II In this session, we will take a look at Angular - a new MVC framework by Google. We will discuss some of the terminology that Angular offers, and see how we can use that to develop highly interactive, dynamic web applications. Angular embraces HTML and CSS, allowing you to extend HTML towards your application, and uses plain JavaScript which makes your code easy to reuse, and test. This is an intro level talk. It is targeted towards developers who are curious about Angular and want to learn about the fundamental features and concepts in Angular.

Ricardo Alcocer @ricardoalcocer 18+ years of experience in software development. Author of Titanium Alloy in Action. Currently work as Lead developer evangelist @ Appcelerator

Advanced Cross-Platform Development This session is about cross-platform thinking, covering the most important aspects of cross-platform development (mobile or not), how it applies to mobile and how Titanium can help you in the creation of native mobile apps that follow the platform's user interface guidelines.

Ryan Bridges @ryanbridges I'm a 30-something parent and aging punk who has spent a dozen or so years in the computer industry.

Workshop: JavaScript Developer's Toolchain This is a hands-on workshop. Please bring your laptop! This workshop will help get you up to speed on modern tools and techniques for building web apps. This session focuses on JavaScript not in the browser, but on the server and command line. We'll explain and work with tools such as nodejs, npm, grunt, bower, yeoman and others. This is a fast-paced session to get you setup and working with the tools that JavaScript devs use to build webapps.

(This workshop requires separate registration and is not included in the main conference fee)

Sam Saccone @samccone Specialties: javascript, html5, css, front end interactions, digital strategy, node

Building Backbone.Marionette & Parse Powered Apps The PARM stack allows you to not get bogged down with the implementation details, not get lost in context switches. Thus letting you execute your idea - with a fast scalable base upon which to go from. It sits upon a specific tech stack that allows you to move fast while keeping a sound base. (PA)RSE - What is parse? Parse is a backend as a service. Their javascript api is built upon backbone models. (R)OOTS - Roots is a light, super fast, and intuitive static build system made for front end development and building web apps. Think grunt without the config, think yeoman with no config. It is an open ended tool to make coding fast and deployment even faster. It allows you to write in the language(s) of your preference. From coffeescript to dogescript. From haml to jade. (M)ARIONETTE.JS - Marionette is the view glue upon which parse and backbone sit. It provides a (semi) opinionated framework upon which to build your app. Taking the best™ practices of standard backbone view handling and abstracting them into ItemView and CollectionView concepts.

Sanjay Bhatia @datasanj Sanjay Bhatia is a first generation American, inventor, entrepreneur and pioneer in interactive analytics and data visualization. Sanjay is founder and CEO of Izenda, a venture-backed business intelligence platform that dynamically and securely integrates intuitive reporting and visual data exploration into modern business applications. Sanjay started his career coding graphics algorithms in x86 assembly and created one of the first commercial-scale pizza ordering systems in the early days of the internet.

He’s won TIE Entrepreneur of the year, Power 30 under 30 and has been highlighted nationally on FOX, NBC, Channel 9, Jezabel and has been on various books and radio shows.

Sanjay has worked at Radiant Systems, Trilogy and the Microsoft Visual Studio Team where he helped Launch .NET.

Sanjay earned an MBA in Business Analysis from Georgia state and graduated with high honors with a Computer Science degree specializing in Graphics, Visualization and Usability. He is certified in Ayurveda through the Chopra Center.

Sanjay enjoys traveling to places with palm trees, meditating, mixed-medium painting, HDR photography and doing yoga.

Tranforming Enterprises: Our Visual Journey from Traditional .NET to D3, Angular and Bootstrap Modern platforms awe and amaze, but how do you transition enterprise codebases and cultures toward a modern and open stack capable of delivering data visually? Rebuilding the engine while it’s running is hard but very doable. In this talk we’ll go over the challenging but meaningful journey and where it lead us. We’ll cover best practices and lessons learned that we learned and talk about the power of visualization to transform human perception.

Shamari Feaster @shamari_feaster Shamari Feaster is the sole developer at Feaster Javascript Development. He is a graduate of The Florida State University with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Management Information Systems. He will be starting graduate school at Georgia Tech’s college of Computer Science in the summer of 2014.

Workshop: JavaScript Developer's Toolchain This is a hands-on workshop. Please bring your laptop! This workshop will help get you up to speed on modern tools and techniques for building web apps. This session focuses on JavaScript not in the browser, but on the server and command line. We'll explain and work with tools such as nodejs, npm, grunt, bower, yeoman and others. This is a fast-paced session to get you setup and working with the tools that JavaScript devs use to build webapps.

(This workshop requires separate registration and is not included in the main conference fee)

Shubhra Kar @shubhrakar Shubhra Kar, Director, Products and Systems Engineering at StrongLoop Inc., is an accomplished Node and J2EE technologist with extensive global expertise as an architect, management consultant, product manager, and thought leader. Focussed on emerging tech, for over 15 years and across three continents, he has built and delivered successful solutions with Fortune 500 corporations, helping them bridge the gap between business and IT.

Debugging, Profiling, Heap Dumping, Scaling and other fix-it techniques in Node.js When a Node app isn’t making it through the periods of load, how do you get to the root of the problem. Using only open source tools, I’ll show you how to look inside Node, Modules and V8 to discover where the memory or processor is hung up or the data has gotten corrupt or the errors are being thrown. Also I will share some sauce of scaling on demand in production.
Merging JS Front-End & Back-End Progressive/pre rendering, SEO optimization & realtime/offline sync are some of the magic to be had by combining JavaScript on the front and back end (Node.js). I’ll show some of the tools & techniques for utilizing code on both sides, from Browserify, remoting to isomorphic modeling techniques in Angular and Node. Propel your project, save time by reusing code & libraries; plus it’s fun to be a full-stack ninja.

Stephen Feather @stephenfeather Stephen Feather founded Feather Direct in 2009, recognizing a need for quality mobile app development, reputation management, and SEO services for smaller organizations. He worked directly with communications companies such as Netscape, Microsoft, and Oracle in the early days of the Internet. In 1996 he authored JavaScript by Example, one of the first publications on the then-new scripting language. He volunteers time to assist and train a new generation of app developers through online forums and local user groups.

Using Bluetooth (BLE) to Enhance User Engagement This session will introduce developers to a number of different ways in which they can use BLE technology to increase user engagement. We will look at using BLE in Retail, Education, and the Arts.

Stephen Thomas @stephen_thomas Stephen specializes in front-end development at Georgia Tech’s Department of Education Technology where he is helping to build the Open Academic Environment. He is the author of several books on the Internet and networking technology and has written about JavaScript development for Smashing Magazine, sitepoint and others. His most recent book is Building JavaScript Visualizations from No Starch Press.

Building JavaScript Visualizations Part 1 Adding data visualizations to your web site doesn't have to involve complex, complicated frameworks. There are many open source JavaScript visualization libraries suitable even for novice web designers and web developers. This presentation introduces several of those libraries and the types of visualizations they can create.
Building JavaScript Visualizations Part 2 D3.js is today's most powerful JavaScript framework for building data visualizations in the web browser. It has a reputation, however, for being complex and difficult to learn. This presentation examines the principles behind D3's architecture and shows how that architecture supports the creation of complex, compelling visualizations.

Tim Poulsen @skypanther Software developer for Appcelerator, working on Alloy, the CLI, and tooling projects. Former master-trainer for Appcelerator.

Memory Management in Titanium Apps Memory and leaks and Alloy, oh my! In this session, I'll cover basic memory management concepts in Titanium Classic and Alloy projects. I'll show ways to detect and fix memory leaks, go over some best practices, and do my best to show that Titanium itself is usually not the cause of most memory issues.

Toby Ho @airportyh Toby Ho is a veteran JavaScript developer in Atlanta. He blogs at tobyho.com and is passionate about helping others learn. He is active in the open source community where his proudest work is Test’em - a Javascript test runner.

5 Debugging Tips That Will Make You a Better Developer Toby has put a lot of thought into how to help others improve at the craft of debugging. This talk will be a sampling of the techniques and theories he has amassed in his tool belt. These 5 tips are chosen for their bang-for-the-buck value and their ability to stand on their own. There will be code examples for each tip, and live coding demos for some of them. Although the code examples used will be in JavaScript, you should have no problem at all applying these techniques to other programming languages.

Josh Jensen @joshj Currently a freelance mobile application consultant, Josh brings over 12 years of design, architecture, development and passion to his projects and presentations. In the almost 4 years he has been using Titanium, he has brought hundreds of applications to market for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to startup, as well as contributing to projects like ChariTi and TiDev.io. End to end application structure, including mobile and server application architecture, are just a few of the tools Josh has collected over the years and he is passionate about sharing them with others. Come say hi and he might just buy you a beer.

Tying it all together in real time: Node + PubNub PubNub is a massively scalable real-time platform as a service. We will look at how to harness PubNub's service to easily integrate into your application. Why PubNub? I don't work for them and this is not an advertisement. We will talk about other options as well like Socket.io and Pusher. PubNub is my preferred service for their flexibility, SDK support and ease of use. If you want to know how to build a real time application using Titanium, node and javascript then check out this session. We will go over the nuts and bolts of passing data from one platform to another, as well as how to use that data to create powerful and engaging applications.

Trevor Ward @thewarpedcoder I have been developing software for over 20 years, initially using Cobol before going into web development in the late 90's using Perl, HTML, JavaScript and Oracle. In 2007 I started to use Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex, before moving into mobile application development in early 2011, using the Appcelerator Titanium framework

Alloy Vs. CommonJS A talk which on the surface looks like it is comparing Alloy vs Classic titanium applications. Where in fact it will explain that they are not separate, but without the Classic approach of commonJS, you cannot use Alloy. Exploring how Titanium has become the platform it has, by implementing the commonJS specification, and how by writing an MVC architecture over the top, has eased and increased efficency of developing applications. It will also explore some of the most common misconceptions around Alloy, Classic and TSS. and if and when you should refactor from Classic to Alloy.

Wesley Hales @wesleyhales Wesley Hales is an author, occasional speaker and Lead Software Developer at Shape Security. In his spare time, Wesley works on onslyde and loadreport.js.

You can read his articles, or follow him on twitter @wesleyhales.

High Performance Websocket Adding a WebSocket service to an application is often misunderstood to be high performance by default, however there are many more considerations that must be made, both on the client and server, before the best performance can be achieved. Real-time technologies like SPDY, WebSocket, and soon HTTP 2.0 have their own sets of hurdles and anti-patterns to overcome and this talk will provide the checklist you need to fine tune your application’s real-time performance. We’ll review the following in detail: Using secure WebSocket (WSS) opposed to unsecure (WS), Polyfill performance, WS subprotocols and different styles of interacting with WebSocket services, Binary transmissions and optimizations, Compression, and Battery life and optimizing long lived sessions.

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