On Tuesday 30th November, after a two-year hiatus, Trending.JS was finally back! Our latest tech meetup saw over 50 members of London’s JavaScript community get together at Unmind’s offices next to Borough Tube Station to discuss all things JavaScript. There were a range of talks from a great selection of speakers; we had five talks altogether, with representatives from the likes of Lendable, Marshmallow and, of course, Unmind. It was great to get everyone back in a room together and it was long overdue!
Our first talk was from Dhruv and Jonny at Unmind. Jonny is currently working full stack in the Wellbeing Collective, offering a world-class experience for users to interact with their content. Dhruv is a member of Unmind’s Growth Collective which focusses on Unmind’s reach. They were both keen to discuss the challenges they’ve faced internationalising the Unmind platform, as they look to grow the Unmind team following their Series B funding of $47m earlier on this year. They discussed internationalisation (often abbreviated to i18n due to the number of letters) vs localisation and how they have used localisation software during their growth process across Europe. This includes fetching a users’ locale and using trans static content to make the localisation process as smooth as possible. They also showed an example GraphQL query in both English and French and how they compared side by side.
Our second talk of the evening was from Mike Borozdin. Mike is a jack of all trades and currently Tech Lead at Lendable. In his talk ‘Supercharge Node.js & React with TypeScript’, he discussed a number of topics including type arithmetic’s, string literals, migrating to typescript and strict null undefined checks. He also included a live coding session focused on the cool features and methods of running Typescript and JavaScript side by side. Finally, Mike showed us how TypeScript’s popularity has increased over the past few years in comparison to the likes of Python, Kotlin and Go whilst highlighting some of its disadvantages, too.
We had a short interval, during which we announced the winner of our highly anticipated xmas raffle, where the lucky winner Fabio got his hands on a Hotel Chocolate wreath. To enter the competition, you had to complete a short talent insights survey for our upcoming Salary Guide & Market Report, which is being published in January!
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After the break, Erry treated us to a presentation full of cat memes(!) that demonstrated how to build microservices with AWS Lamdas and Node. Erry has previously worked for the likes of FairFX, Zoopla and Lantum before joining Unmind earlier this year as part of their Foundations collective. Erry’s talk took us through how to run a function to create the serverless boilerplate, editing it to write the lambda function, and then deploying to AWS cloud. After a few technical fur-balls, Erry was able to successfully show us how to fetch a random image from a selection on Github which was met with a sigh of relief and left us purring for more! 😸
Our final talk was with Habs, a Frontend Engineer and member of the frontend guild at Marshmallow. Habs is currently working in the growth team and is responsible for conversion and new business opportunities. She did a great talk discussing what the frontend guild at Marshmallow entails – also known as ‘ducklings’ - and her involvement in their bi-weekly meetings. Habs shared what her brood have been discussing recently; this included styled components, create-react-app configuration woes and why BFF's are elite. Whilst Habs admitted that all the Marshmallow team are all best friends for life, BFF in this instance referred to backend for frontend!
Once the talks concluded, a group joined together at a local pub to continue the conversation! A big thank you to everyone, but particularly our speakers for giving up their time to share their passion for their topics. It was a great event and we hope to host another Trending.JS event in the not-too-distant future!
