Earlier this month, some lucky ‘Swarmers’ got the chance to attend ScotlandJS – one of the largest JavaScript conferences in the UK. Having returned to work inspired last week following the conference on the 19th and 20th July, we wanted to share with you some of our highlights.
Not only were we there to listen to some inspirational talks and contribute to some interesting discussions, but we were very proud to be sponsoring the event again this year – which meant in between the talks and sessions, we were able to meet some fantastic people from the industry and tell them about SwarmOnline, what we do and what it’s like to be a Swarmer! You can find out for yourself, and view our current job openings here.
#HackTheHive
On the first day of the conference we launched a brand-new competition called #HackTheHive. The premise behind this was to create a hackable website, which (once hacked) would reveal a unique code allowing the “hacker” to enter our prize draw. The response we got to this was amazing, with both people from ScotlandJS and all over the UK getting involved. We were delighted to raise awareness amongst the tech community of cyber security and the importance of building secure websites, you can read more on this here.
We drew a winner on Wed 25th July – congratulations to successful ‘Hive Hacker’ Calum Hall who won a nice set of high-end Sennheiser headphones! You can view Andrew, Swarm MD & Founder drawing the winner here…
And the winner of our #HackTheHive competition is…… pic.twitter.com/o4CYuW4mCU
— SwarmOnline (@SwarmOnline) July 25, 2018
Talk Highlights…
The conference was packed with a range of great talks on JavaScript and diversity in the software industry. Speakers had travelled from all over the world to come and share their knowledge and experiences with us… here are a few of our personal highlights:
“HOW TEACHING KIDS TO CODE CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER DEVELOPER” – Ramon Huidobro
@senorhuidobro
Ramon Huidobro gave a talk about his experience teaching children to code. It detailed various situations that made him question coding habits he’d built up over the years and ultimately how an approach to looking at problems with more naivety managed to rekindle his passion for programming. We found this particularly interesting as, while perhaps not with children like in Ramon’s experience, mentorship is something we value highly here at Swarm and after hearing Ramon’s talk we are keen to build on our mentoring opportunities with interns, graduates and work experience students. Learning to code has been such a valuable experience for each of us in the development team at Swarm and if we can help the next generation get excited about a potential career in tech while developing our own skills too then it’s a win-win!
“WHAT TAMAGOTCHIS CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT ES6 GENERATORS” – Jenn Creighton
@gurlcode
Jenn Creighton delved into the topic of ES6 generators, a fairly underused feature of more modern JavaScript. The talk focused on animating a Tamagotchi and how generators could allow you to fluidly stop an animation in order to instantly transition into the next one.
ELECTRON: FROM AWESOME TO SCARY AND BACK AGAIN – Florencia Herra Vega
@flohdot
More and more desktop applications are being built using Electron including Slack and even editors like Atom/VSCode. Florencia took us through some of the good and bad parts of this and detailed various security considerations that should be made when developing an app in Electron.
CODE YOUR FUTURE – Irina Preda
@IrinaPreda
Diversity, inclusion and opportunity have played huge roles in past ScotlandJS events and this year was no different. This talk focused on the positive impact ‘Code Your Future’ are having on the community in Glasgow by providing refugees with the skills required to code! These skills are giving refugees fantastic opportunities to better their lives and get passionate about learning something new! Irina detailed her experiences helping refugees build a future for themselves here in the UK by learning to code.
Anyone can learn to code, attending university is not always mandatory there are always other paths! (See our blog post on ‘No Wrong Path’ here). It was enlightening to see those without the option of university being given a chance to learn and gain skills to enter our workforce.
We thoroughly enjoyed our time at ScotlandJS and we’ve learnt heaps about JavaScript from all the inspiring speakers. We loved getting the chance to meet other enthusiastic developers in the community and we were saddened by the news that it was the last ScotlandJS – hopefully it will return in some form in the future!
