Chris Heilmann opened his talk at BrazilJS 2015 by likening programmers to rock bands. You have your front-men stars that get all the fame and attention, but then you have the behind-the-scenes bassists. This analogy struck a chord with me (pun intended). I work really hard and am valued for my contributions, but I am not a known entity in the programmer community. I have not created any notable libraries, written programming languages, authored books, or architected a killer app. I am not the typical rock star that usually fills the speaker's roster at a tech conference as a lowly application developer. So imagine my surprise when I got a chance for a second year in a row to be a speaker at BrazilJS!
Last year while I was still on my adrenaline high after the conference, I swore to myself that I would write about the experience since I would probably never have that sort of opportunity again. But it never happened. So now that I have a second chance, I've got to do this for sure.
I'm calling this an "outsider's adventure" because I was not only a bassist hanging out among the rock-star speakers at this conference, but I was also an American English speaker among Portuguese Brazilians. And as an outsider, I don't have a well-informed perspective on things, so please forgive any ignorant statements I may write.
News of the opportunity came on short notice for me; I am not a confident, experienced public speaker that can easily whip together a presentation. I knew that the same sort of bland topic I had last year would not do. The line-up and material in BrazilJS 2014 was amazing, so I needed to step up as much as possible. The good news is that the visa I had to hurriedly obtain last year was still good for another 10 years, so I didn't have to take multiple trips to the San Francisco consulate this time.
Last year, I spoke on the CI/CD process used at GoDaddy, which to me was an exciting, novel thing that revolutionized the way that we deliver software. Although many attendees told me they found it helpful, I met plenty of engineers afterward who were excited to show me their CI/CD technology, and I knew that my "state of the art" was passe to others. So this time, I wanted a topic that was more unique, while still being relevant to today's developers. I decided to talk about Functional Reactive Programming, which is not something being used at GoDaddy (as far as I know), but is something I, as a functional programming enthusiast, would love our team to use in our application.
The topic of functional programming can be unfortunately dry, with lots of academic mathematical jargon, and high amounts of abstraction that can make it seem impractical to the average developer. It was important to me to explain, even before getting into the reactive programming parts to reinforce why functional programming is important and learning it does serve a vital purpose. Also, I wanted some audience participation and mild entertainment, key components of any successful tech talk. So I decided to create a simple game.
(Thanks to Erica and my dear friends for putting up with me being a recluse on evenings and weekends while I prepared the material!)
Seattle is really far from Porto Alegre. After Erica so kindly dropped me off at a late hour, I flew overnight to Miami, FL, and from there went to Curitiba, then Porto Alegre. In all, I think it was about 20 hours in the air. The organizer that helped our Latin America international team organize the GoDaddy booth was kind enough to pick me up at 11 PM and get me on a taxi for the hotel, a huge inconvenience for him since his hotel was near the airport. Thanks again, Luciano!
The hotel was the Sheraton, which was a comfortable familiarity for this American. The service was great. I had stupidly not brought any power adapters with me to this country, but their front desk was able to supply me with a few. For a nerd like me, home is where your devices are charging and Wi-Fi abounds, so I could now finally relax and get some sleep.
For those who haven't stayed in Brazil before, here are some interesting facts:
- The A/C plugs are really different from what you see either in the US or Europe.
- The water pressure in the shower is immense; you can really blast your skin clean with their shower heads. Note: Q means hot and F means cold.
- Do not flush toilet paper! Throw that stuff in the bin. It's really not too gross once you get used to it, but I had to dig some soggy stuff out of the bowl when I accidentally went into autopilot.
- Brazil is not a country where tips are a thing. Hooray for sanity!
Tomas, my fellow GoDaddy co-worker in the International department who is from Sao Paulo, was kind enough to meet me early in the morning for breakfast and hire us a cab to the event. Last year, I thought the venue selected for BrazilJS was fine, a comfortable theater located in a shopping mall. This year, it was again located in a mall, but this time we were in a huge room with a stage, four projector screens, and many rows of seats. Lively sponsor booths ringed the room, so everything was in one place.
Since 2015 marks the 20th year anniversary of the JavaScript language, the theme was 1995. Nostalgia-inducing music blared over the speakers. Hearing all that grunge brought happiness to this Seattle-ite "90's kid." There was also a VR time machine headset (I didn't get to use this), and circa-1995 game consoles where you could play some Mario Brothers and Sonic. The Back to the Future decorations were a little anachronistic, but it worked since we were travelling back in time to the days of JavaScript past. The lights, sound, and decoration made the atmosphere lively and exciting. Kudos to the organizers!
The booths were also a lot of fun. The GoDaddy booth had some clever contests. One was a math puzzle. Attendees were given stickers with numbers, and if they could find a way to combine theirs with others' numbers using any math operations to create the number "pi," they would win. I think our organizers were disappointed that this was already solved by 9:30 AM. They also had a contest for the best response to the question "if you were a JavaScript function, what would you be?" The winning contestant had something to the effect of "in my function, love is the constant, and you are the variable." Eh, programmer humor.
Mozilla, once again, showed up the other sponsors with its display. They had a barista, beer kegs, another virtual reality helmet, and Web GL games. Show offs!
The event was kicked off by an unexpected Power Rangers battle enacted by none other than the organizers themselves in costume. Christian Heilmann then gave his great opening talk. Douglas Campos was next talking ASTs, and Felipe Ribeiro told a great story of how Spotify migrated to JavaScript. Damian Schenkelman taught us about sharing buffers for parallelization, and Reinaldo Ferraz showed us how to make our sites accessible. Tania Gonzalez gave a great rundown of the alphabet soup of technology essential for JS development, and Raphael Amorim recounted his experience writing open source code for 500 days. Nicolas Bevacqua shared tips on squeezing performance out of your app, and Nick Desaulniers talked about WASM, SIMD, WebGL2, and more about shared arrays for making games. David Bryant, the CTO of Mozilla then concluded the evening's talks.
At the end of the first day's talks, we had a chance to do a "dry run" and test our slides out with the A/V equipment. I had quite a panic when I noted that, while I could connect to the Wi-Fi provided for speakers, I could not open up my slide show at all, nor the game which was hosted on the Internet. I was ready to, in despair, go to my room and hurriedly come up with a plan B for my presentation by moving my slides to something on my local machine and figuring out how to present the demo without audience participation. To my huge relief, the organizers were able to provide a trusty Ethernet cable that got me all the Internet I needed, so I could relax and enjoy an evening out with the speakers.
I was pleased that once again, the organizers treated the speakers to dinner at the same place as last year, Galpão Crioul Churrascaria Comidas Campeiras. This place is great. The food is basically the same as what you get at a "Brazilian restaurant" in the US as well as music, dance, and bolas. If you haven't been to a Brazilian restaurant, it's quite a thing. An all-you-can-eat ordeal, you can fill your plate at a salad bar, and waiters bring big skewers of various meats (mostly beef) to the tables. If you opt in for a meat selection, they slice off a hunk for you, which you'll grab with a pair of tongs to put on your plate. There was chicken heart (yum!), lamb, chicken, and lots of beef, including the famous picanha (top sirloin cap), There was also plenty of drinks to be had of course.
The dancing was great, with sparking swords being cracked together and clanking spurs. However, the highlight has to be the guy with the bolas. Laurie Voss at our table did well likening him to Animal from the Muppets. He swung these things around, screaming with a manic energy. His best trick was whirling these things around cringe-inducingly close to people's heads to whip their hair around or knock a cigarette stub out of their mouths. After performing each feat, he did stylish spin and struck a bad-ass pose that is the most Latin-looking thing you can imagine.
At dinner, there were of course many distinguished individuals. I knew this, but I don't really follow the celebrities of my industry that closely. I knew who Brendan Eich was, having seen him while attending other conferences, but at first I had no idea who I was seated with at dinner. At this English-speaking end of the table, I was across from some guy named Laurie Voss with an odd accent (apparently from Trinidad & Tobago), a young-looking curly-headed blond, and a Bohemian-looking individual with a crazy beard who I learned only ever cut his own hair with a pair of scissors.
The conversation was great. The guy across from me was especially entertaining and caused many of us to crack up throughout the night. The Aussie was also fun, but seemed strangely nervous; maybe he's also a fish-out-of-water like me? I mistakenly speculated. Someone cracked a joke that he wanted to be at the "cool table" with Brendan Eich and the Mozilla posse, and Laurie retorted, we've got "substack" (the bearded guy) and Sebastian McKenzie here, so we are the cool table. "Substack" sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall why. We talked about a variety of things, but at one point, ES6 (or is it called JavaScript 2015 now?) was brought up. I was asked how I was using it in my project, and I said I was using the awesome Babel transpiler through a Webpack plugin. Sebastian started making consolatory remarks about this and asked Substack what he thought of Webpack. There was then a round of criticism about some of its design decisions. It wasn't until the next day's talks when I learned that Laurie Voss is the CTO of NPM, Sebastian McKenzie is the 18-year-old prodigy that created BabelJS, and Substack created Browserify (a competing project with Webpack).
It seems that Brazilians usually eat really late, so I didn't get back to my hotel until 1 AM. Then, just to be safe, I also got my slides and game working on my local machine just in case the Internet thing didn't work out (note to self, never put everything on the Internet again!). Now my main worry was that the meager amount of sleep I'd be getting would derail everything.
My presentation time was at the perfect time slot. I wish I had more than 30 minutes to present, but given how last-minute my addition was, I'm entirely grateful I got something. The second spot on the second day is perfect because I got to see how things went for an entire day in order to be prepared for what to expect, and a talk before me when the A/V kinks for the day could be worked out. Substack was on before me and took the brunt of testing out the audio settings.
Watching James Halliday (substack) in action was a thing of beauty. This guy's "slides" were him typing at a terminal and navigating around vim. He gave a great introduction to logs (specifically content-indexed logs) and live-coded apps with the base functionality of Twitter and Flickr all in node, as well as showing how to tie it all in with torrents (ok, it wasn't all live-coded, but a great amount of it was). When he made coding mistakes, it took him 0.2 seconds to identify and fix them. You know those ridiculous Hollywood "hackers" which achieve unrealistic amounts of tasks with a whirlwind of keystrokes? Well, now I have met their real-world match. What an act to follow.
I honestly don't remember much about my talk. Somehow, despite my introversion, I get into a fugue state when on stage. All the nervousness melts away, and I calmly present the material. I do remember that pivotal moment when I invited the audience to join the game, praying that enough people could connect to the 'Net and actually participate. Much to my relief, it worked, and it turned out even better than I expected. Afterward, I was approached by many developers who told me it was a good presentation that sparked their interest in not just FRP, but functional programming in general. The adrenaline rush and happiness that things worked out made me feel like I was floating in air for the rest of the day. Mission accomplished!
Ju Gonçalves gave a talk on functional programming (the all-powerful reduce function) after mine, which was a good follow-up to my dumbed-down intro. This was followed by an interesting talk by Diogo Lucas on how JS is used in the agricultural sector.
The presentation by Laurie Voss was extremely good. I learned a lot of new NPM commands and gained some insight into what the future held for NPM. I was really touched with what happened at the very end of the presentation as well, when he promoted a website for LBGTQ programmers.
If you don't know this about Brazil, there is a legacy of "machismo" in the culture, which surfaces through things like objectification of women and homophobia. Last year, for example, every time I took a taxi, the driver would comment on each woman we saw, either insulting her for being ugly or leering at the pretty ones. This year, I saw many homophobic epitaphs graffitied on walls. So the fact that Laurie took the opportunity to reach out in support for the marginalized was really inspiring. For what it's worth, I have seen really good signs that efforts are being made to change aspects of Brazilian culture. I remember last year, during the Mozilla hackathon, someone made a crack that a developer that was going to be moving to San Francisco was going to be turned gay. He was quickly chided by another Brazilian, who called him out on his ignorance. The conference organizers did their part by encouraging diversity in their code of conduct, reinforced by a public reminder to be respectful to not just women, but all attendees. On my vacation to Rio after the conference, I saw many anti-homophobia campaigns throughout the city, so it seems that, as in the United States, there's a big effort to improve on issues of gender and sexuality.
When Sebastian was introduced to speak, there was thunderous applause, maybe even more than that for Brendan Eich. It was at this time that I learned he was the creator of Babel (which he pronounces "babble", not "bay-bel" like the tower). I knew from our dinner conversation that he worked at Facebook, but had no idea what he did there, and was surprised with how young he is to have done such an amazing project. Despite his brilliance, he still was nervous to be on stage. The talk was excellent.
Ryan Salva couldn't make it, so there was a Q&A for a panel of developers from Microsoft to discuss the new Edge browser. I found this very interesting, as Christian Heilmann discussed things like the difficulty moving Microsoft software to open source and how priorities for the project were being set. Fernando Miçalli then gave a very educational recount of how, over many years, the news website he worked on evolved to provide real-time information about football games and elections using different technologies.
Jonathan Sampson was next. He wowed the audience by being a "gringo" that spoke Portuguese, but his talk was also really good, as he showcased the new ES6 language features and how they translated to ES5 (using the TypeScript transpiler since he is a Microsoft guy).
Julián Duque brought the cool after this by demonstrating many NodeBots (devices programmed using node.js) he had built. These ranged from LED strip displays & worn accessories to a drone flown through the audience. You could really see the love he has for programming.
Brendan Eich's talk was entertaining, as he poked fun at quirks of the language and showed content from wtfjs. But it was also enlightening to learn more of the history of why things are the way they are. He also was really excited (as am I) about WebAssembly and what it can mean for the future of JavaScript.
After the talks were done, the floor was cleared, and a really great cover band came on stage (Crime Scene), bringing us 90's favorites. Unlimited German-style craft beer from Porto Alegre flowed from the taps, and a good time was had by all. I couldn't help but go out onto the floor and "mosh" with fellow geeks to the sweet refrains of Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana, sweating like a fool.
But the mini concert wasn't the best thing of the evening. Last year, I got to acquaint myself with many great developers during and after the conference, and have some drinks and good conversation. Some of these guys I saw again this year, though sadly I didn't find all of them. In 2015, I once again had the immense pleasure of geeking out with fellow dev brethren from Brazil. Eventually, my adrenaline wore off and my lack of sleep caught up with me, so I sadly didn't get to stay out late this time.
BrazilJS 2014 was the best tech conference I'd ever attended, and now it's only been topped by BrazilJS 2015. The organizers should be commended for finding top-quality presenters and keeping things consistently lively and entertaining throughout. They do a great job making sure the speakers are helped through the complications of language barriers, transportation, lodging, and meals; I definitely felt taken care of and comfortable through the proceedings.
But I think the main reason BrazilJS is my favorite conference is the vibe. The conference has a different emotional atmosphere than what I usually encounter at these things, one that is joyous. Everyone seems to be genuinely excited to be there and express a real love of their craft, which is what we should all feel programming in perhaps the best time to be a coder.
I know that I don't exactly fit in as a speaker at a major tech conference like BrazilJS, but I'm really grateful for the circumstances which enabled me to be there and for the warm reception given to me by the organizers, the rock stars, and the attendees. Obrigado!