Thunder Plains

Developer Conference

October 9th 2014Oklahoma City

Developer Conference

Thunder Plainsis a web and mobile developer conference organized by theOklahoma City Javascript User Group. The conference focuses on JavaScript and related technologies in a wide variety of different use cases and platforms that make the web all the more interesting.

  • JavascriptJavascript
  • HTMLHTML
  • CSSCSS
  • APIsAPIs
  • MobileMobile

Schedule

Room 8Room 9Room 10

Registration

Opening Announcements

Opening Keynote

Luke Crouch

Web For America

Luke Crouch

The web enables us to make software that reaches and connects everyone. But the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. Are we working on the right things? This talk tells the story of the Code for Tulsa brigade, and why you can use web development to make your city, our state, and maybe our world a better place.

I write web code and help manage web development for Mozilla Developer Network. I organize some local tech communities. Tulsa Web Devs' mission is to make Tulsa on of the greatest cities in the world for web developers. Code for Tulsa is a Code for America Brigade. I owe all my best experiences to the open-source community and try to give back. I'm also currently working on an open-source startup - codesy.io. I brew my own beer, when I have time. I also help monks brew beer at a nearby Abbey once a month. I do Sprint-distance Triathlons. I'm a fan of Liverpool Reds and Oklahoma City Thunder.

Aaron Murray

Real World React.js

Aaron Murray

React.js brings significant benefits to front-end development: performant virtual DOM diff, one-way data flow and a great component system. React, however, is just the "V" in MVC, so the question of how to actually architect your application quickly arises. In this talk we will explore using React to build full apps including complementary libs, tooling, pain points and more. We will touch on the flux pattern and our React-based MV* implementation.

Hacker, Beatmaker, Taoist, Artist, Architect, Comic nerd
//
Co-founder @WeAreFractal, @HackingTheTao.

Eric Schoftstall

Genome.js

Eric Schoffstall

Genetics: the final frontier. What is the link between the human genome and Javascript? Do you want to find out why your body does that weird thing? In this talk we will unravel the mystery surrounding your source code, and explore using Javascript to make sense of it. Included with your ticket is a copy of my genome which you may use to make clones.

Enthusiast of everything. Experiencing life through code.
//
Co-founder @wearefractal

Gordon Bockus

Building Massive Angular Apps

Gordon Bockus

I will be describing in detail why organizing and preparing your team and project for when it gets large is an obvious win over the lifetime of a web application. Specifically talking about how spending some time and effort considering the long term implications of up front design and tooling decisions will result in a better organized and easily maintained project as it gets MASSIVE! I'll go into detail about tools, processes, can best practices that will help make the project scalable and maintainable. There will be a section that is specific to Angular applications taking about 1/3 of the available time.

I'm a full stack software engineer with a focus on client side technology. // Senior Software Engineer at Spanning Cloud Apps

Waylon Flinn

Making Magic with Node.js and Redis

Waylon Flinn

Ever wanted to make a game? How about a recommendation engine? Come hear how Crunch Magic mixed Node.js and Redis into a potion that does both.

Waylon started out in a town with not so much as a calculus class anywhere in a 50 mile radius and began teaching himself to program when he was 11. He eventually got degrees in Physics and Math and wrote the software they use to test astronauts on the International Space Station. The first game he ever loved was Final Fantasy on the NES. Now he thinks games are the future of the world and he's dedicated his life to making life more fun.

Jenn Schiffer

Your Grandparents Probably Didn't Have Node

Jenn Schiffer

Using build tools and public git repositories allow developers to create for and distribute our work to...other developers. But what about artists and writers and other non-developers who don't know how to open terminal, let alone run `npm install`? I'm going to talk about how I entered this problem space by building a drawing app and learning how to document and distribute code in a way that people of all technical and non-technical backgrounds can enjoy it.

Jenn Schiffer is an engineer at Bocoup and creator of make8bitart.com. She enjoys humor and art immensely, as well as working her love of programming, computer science, and the open web into those hobbies.

Jeff French

Awesomify Your Dev Environment [Docker + Vagrant]

Jeff French

But it works on my machine!” Oh, that terrible feeling when the code that runs like a champ in your dev environment falls flat on its face in production. And you don’t know why.

A missing dependency?
Permission issue?
Wrong version of Node installed?

Don’t worry, there is a very nice solution to this problem: Make the dev environment match the production environment. In this session we’ll take a look at how to run our code in a Docker container to ensure dev and production are identical. We’ll start with an introduction to Docker and how it works and move on to running our NodeJS API in a container. We’ll also take a look at Vagrant for running and building these Docker containers a development time. When you leave this session you have a good understanding of what Docker and Vagrant are, how they make your development and production environments better, and how they work together.

Jeff French is an experienced developer with a passion for automation, software craftsmanship and good craft beer. A mild mannered developer by day and a hopeless technology junky by night. He has extensive experience in web and mobile application development, deployment automation, and continuous delivery. He constantly strives to learn how new technologies can help solve real world problems. He has been a contributor to such open source projects as MVC Turbine, Shoelace-MVC and Octopus Deploy’s OctoPack. Jeff is an international speaker at technology conferences giving talks on DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Mobile and Web Development, Javascript frameworks and whatever else strikes his interest.

Lunch Break - Sponsored By

Josh Bavari

Mobile Applications with JS and Ionic

Josh Bavari

Theres two things I am absolutely passionate about:

1) Cordova for mobile applications
2) JavaScript

Using the Javascript framework Ionic built on top of Cordova, it's easy to make slick mobile applications built with web technologies. Ionic is built with several components from AngularJS, is open source, and has an ever growing user base with forums. Lets embrace JavaScript and make apps that are capable of running on your mobile phone through an app or a web browser.

Ever since plugging in to a computer at a young age, Josh has been passionate about learning technology and helping others learn. Since 2006, Josh has worked in a variety of business settings ranging from start ups, medium size businesses, and on to the enterprise level. Currently Josh works for a local start up, RaiseMore, where he is focused on building a platform using technologies such as Ruby, Rails, Javascript, HTML5, and PhoneGap.

Jennifer Wadella

The Importance of Building Developer Communities

Jennifer Wadella

Today, companies are competing for technology talent more than for business. As a developer, you have more power than you may realize. You have the power to shape our technology landscape and build the kind of companies for which you want to work (and not just by founding them). Google doesn’t hold the monopoly on developer culture nor does Silicon Valley hold the monopoly on job opportunities in innovation. Learn how as a developer at any level of the corporate ladder you can make an impact in your company, and Kansas City, through building developer communities.

Jennifer Wadella has been writing code since before she realized it was a credible career path. She currently works as a web developer at MindMixer and loves building javascript applications and attending hackathons. She is an active member of the KC tech community and the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology(KCWiT), a non-profit aimed at growing the number of women in technology careers in Kansas City. She founded and organizes CoderDojoKC, a program that brings mentors in to teach kids how to code, and is a Tech sHeroes mentor, sits on the Shawnee Mission School District CTE Advisory board, is a committee member of the KC Girls in STEM initiative, and is on the JCCC Young Women in STEM Conference planning committee. She doesn't blog, but she can handle 140 characters.

Derick Bailey

Johnny Five is Alive

Derick Bailey

Atwood's Law says that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript" and it's hard to think of any prediction of software development's future that has been more accurate than this! The "applications" that we are writing in JavaScript are no longer limited to browsers or even general purpose computing devices. There's a growing army of do-it-yourself electronics out there, and thanks the ingenuity of people like Rick Waldron and his Johnny-Five framework for NodeJS, we have robots that run on JavaScript!

Yes, ROBOTS THAT RUN ON JAVASCRIPT! Johnny-Five *is* alive! But, unlike the 1986 hollywood robot from which the Johnny-Five framework gets its name, no robots will be struck by lightning or gain artificial intelligence in this presentation. What you'll see, instead, is a guy with a little bit of electronics knowledge, a willingness to plug wires in to batteries, and an empty wallet from buying far too many Arduino toys.

See what the electro-mechanical-buzz is all about as Derick blows some LEDs, shows some real world interaction with an XBox controller, and drives a robot with a LeapMotion device! Come for the robots, stay for the accidental birth of SkyNet from a misplaced "this" in a JavaScript callback!

Derick Bailey is an entrepreneur, developer, screencaster, writer, blogger, speaker and technology leader in central Texas (north of Austin). He runs a podcast hosting service at SignalLeaf.com, and throws down the screencasts at WatchMeCode.net. He has been a professional software developer since the late 90’s, and has been writing code since the late 80’s.

In his spare time he builds ridiculous electronic toys with Arduino (and a nearby first aid kit), is 1/3rd of a podcast on being a developer/entrepreneur, gets called a spamming marketer by people on Twitter, and blurts out all of the stupid / funny things he's ever done in his career on his email newsletter.

Follow @derickbailey, and keep up with the latest bloggerings and writing at derickbailey.com.

Tracy Hinds

Use Your Words!

Tracy Hinds

Twitter flame wars. Open source project failures through contributor fallout. Bullying that leads to the bullying of bullies.

How do we maintain our communities? How do we grow them? How is anyone in their right mind stepping into the caustic social media environment of programming we have created for ourselves?

There are steps we can take with user groups, conferences, online worlds that can help support an inclusive environment that allows for debate, learning, growing, and excitement. The social sciences have 100 years of research that can provide us with tools to treat our fellow programmers with care. Much of this has been battle-tested in the organizations we run. The bubbles we live in. Let's share how we're creating a better world that is welcoming to programmers, new and experienced, so that we're leading by example.

Your words are powerful, and “actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often.”

By day, Tracy Hinds is a Web Engineer at Urban Airship in NYC; by nights and weekends, Cat Herder of programming events shenanigans. She frequents the internets and attempts tiny revolutions of confidence--one encouragement at a time. When she isn't coding, organizing, monkeying up rocks/trees or bicycling to and from the glorious amount of tech meetups she can't resist--she's talking your ear off about them(or anything else she's read about that day). You have been warned.

**Also recently discovered she enjoys screaming over loud music about JavaScript more than most.

Jeremy Green

Supercharge Your Productivity with Ember.js

Jeremy Green

Ember is an opinionated application framework. Like many opinionated frameworks things get much easier when you learn what those opinions are, and why they are in place. This session will bring you up to speed on the concepts represented by all of the major parts of the framework, and you'll be well on your way to quickly delivering highly interactive applications.

MVC is a popular pattern used in both server side and client side frameworks. Unfortunately due to the differences in focus, some of the common words and phrases can become overloaded and confused. This session will dive into the specific parts of server and client side MVC patterns, comparing and contrasting each part of the system. Code examples will be in Ruby on Rails for the server, and Ember.js for the client, but the concepts will be broadly applicable to other languages.

Jeremy is a full stack engineer who has been creating web apps for over 15 years. He's an organizer of the OkcRuby developer group and an active open source contributor. You might also find him drumming, shooting photos, or brewing.

Chris Dickinson

Better Living through Control Flow Graph Generation

Chris Dickinson

This talk will be an introduction to the data structures and phases involved in parsing (tokenization, abstract syntax trees, control flow graph generation), and what useful tools can be built on the various derived formats of your code. The overarching theme is that dealing with your code on a different level of abstraction gives you superpowers. This talk will include information about control flow graphs + doing code review, static analysis, and optimization with that intermediate format.

Chris is a software engineer at Walmart Labs in Portland Oregon.

Break

Kassandra Perch

NodeBots Wearables: JavaScripting Your Wardrobe

Kassandra Perch

As NodeBots platforms get more and more diverse, they're also getting smaller and easier to build and program. This talk explores crafting wearable tech using sensors, outputs, and all written in JS. This includes sewing together robotics pieces, dealing with stray wires, and other wearables-specific challenges.

I'm an engineering evangelist for RetailMeNot in Austin, TX. When I'm not writing javascript, teaching for Girl Develop It Austin, or building robots, I'm crafting or playing a new video game.

Jordan Rousseau

So tell me again why we're not using node.js?

Jordan Rousseau

Two years ago at WDT, the technology solution for any web application was LAMP. My breaking point was us investigating Zend PHP to expand our application capabilities. I was over it, we knew JavaScript and there was a great new (but a bit unstable) platform out that was starting to make some noise. It was time to make a change.

I went through struggles with management, other developers and most definitely myself on whether or not node.js was the right technology (spoiler alert, it might not be).

I want to share my experiences and tips on how to make the decision if node is right for your company and how to convince others (and especially yourself) that node will work and it's not really going out on a limb.

Jordan is a recovering ActionScript developer who is passionate about open geo and data visualization platforms. Jordan currently works for Weather Decision Technologies. He leads a team of crazy talented developers making the world of weather more accessible. When Jordan isn't making all the JavaScript things, he enjoys breaking builds in Jenkins.

Adam Baldwin

Node.js Security Live

Adam Baldwin

For years developers have been told to think about and bake security into their apps while they code for various reasons. This talk will explore this old adage and see just how it might play out, live. As a web application is built we will explore when is the right time to think about security controls like authentication, authorization, security headers and many more and what can happen if those are ignored.

The BBS owner, having discovered that some kid had brute-forced his passwords for funsies, declined to press charges against Adam, and instead did the next best thing: offered him a job. Under that long-ago sensei’s tutelage, Adam learned the ways of hacking and of reverse engineering, awakening a love for breaking things.

Adam is adept in assessing and securing Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Django, and PHP web apps, as well as providing expertise on secure application design and performing penetration testing at key project points prior to and after launch.

When he’s not experiencing the beauty of winning, Adam is spending time with his equally lovely family and giving speeches on web security at like all the conferences ever.

Closing Keynote

Chris Williams [Vodoo Tiki God]

Democratizing Hardware

Chris Williams

With the rise of widely available chipsets, open source hardware components, and makerspaces, the only thing holding back the coming Hardware Revolution is... the arcane languages needed to program them. While most of the development industry has pushed forward into far more accessible and expressive languages, the domain of hardware has been stuck in the 1980's. With the rise of NodeBots, which started as node.js robots but is now inclusive of all languages, the trend toward making hardware hacking accessible to all has grown stronger and broader.

As a gatekeeper between the two worlds, due to being the author of node-serialport, I have been witness to this amazing trend and would like to invite you to join us as we bring robots, copters, boats, and rockets, but most importantly the maker movement to all software and web developers.

Maker of Improbable Things. VoodooSpark, node-serialport, nodebots, nodecopter, JSConf, RobotsConf, saferaging, beerjs, and more.

Closing Remarks & Prize Drawing

After Party (Off-site) - Sponsored by Mandrill

Passes - SOLD OUT!

  • Lightning


    First 20 tickets sold - SOLD OUT!
    $8500
  • Thunder


    Through August 15th
    $10000
  • Rain


    Through September 12th
    $11000
  • Regular Pass


    Through October 8th
    $12500
  • Onsite Pass


    At the door
    $15000
  • Students


    w/ valid Student ID
    $8500
  • Herd


    5 or more tickets (bulk only)
    $10000/ea

All 275 tickets are SOLD OUT! This event is gonna be rockin'!

Code of Conduct

Before attending the conference,please review the Thunder Plains Code of Conduct. The CoC applies to all attendees, speakers, volunteers, and vendors at official and unofficial events by Thunder Plains and any location where attendees may be congregating.Contact us if you have questions about the COC.


Our conference is a safe learning environment for everyone. The safety and well-being of attendees and others is our utmost concern, so please speak up and speak out. We're here for you.

Where it’s at

Located at theCox Convention Center in downtown Oklahoma City
within walking distance of great hotels and restaurants.

With help from these fine folks