The Bendyworks Conference Roadshow Early 2017

We're kicking off 2017 with a bang. Six Bendyworkers are giving 17 presentations at 13 events in 10 cities in 4 countries and 1 ocean over 6 months. Topics include JavaScript, IoT, immutability, salary, Elm, and the Twitter API. Come and say hi.

February

Get talking with Actions on Google

GDG Chicago - February 8th - Chicago, IL - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Let your users be the voice talent with Actions on Google. Learn how to design, develop, and distribute rich conversational experiences or direct action commands. We’ll show you how to approach voice-driven, natural language interactions with API.AI’s powerful bot platform.

Web Components: Lego bricks of the web

DevFest KC - February 18th - Kansas City, MO - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Writing the same login form over and over again? Web components offer a modular approach to creating reusable UI widgets. Ditch large, complex frameworks and drop these lightweight building blocks into your site. We will show you how to build custom elements and introduce you to the existing elements and tools available from Google’s Polymer Project.

Leverage the power of native with Progressive Web Apps

DevFest KC - February 18th - Kansas City, MO - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

As developers, we want to create apps that engage users across multiple devices. But building native apps is costly and cumbersome. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the power of native apps with the ease of building and deploying web apps. Learn to craft PWA experiences using new web standards, including service workers, push notifications, and homescreen access.

Get talking with Actions on Google

DevFest KC - February 18th - Kansas City, MO - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Let your users be the voice talent with Actions on Google. Learn how to design, develop, and distribute rich conversational experiences or direct action commands. We’ll show you how to approach voice-driven, natural language interactions with API.AI’s powerful bot platform.

Immutable Hash Maps: Plenty of room at the bottom

BOB - February 24th - Berlin, Germany - Cliff Rodgers & Peter Schuck

The Hash Array Mapped Trie (HAMT) has become the standard implementation for Immutable Hash Maps. However there is still room for big improvements with this central data structure.

The Compressed Hash Array Mapped Prefix-tree (CHAMP) is a modification of the Hash Array Mapped Trie that performs the hat trick of

  • Speeding up iteration and equality checking by 100% or more
  • Lowers memory overhead
  • Reduces the lines of code needed by 33%, along with making the implementation much easier to understand

March

Web Components: Lego bricks of the web

JazzCon.Tech - March 22-24th - New Orleans, LA - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Writing the same login form over and over again? Web components offer a modular approach to creating reusable UI widgets. Use the native web platform to build performant, lightweight building blocks for your site. We will show you how to build custom elements using best practices and how to integrate them with your Angular project.

Clojure/West - March 30-31st - Portland, OR - Peter Schuck

ClojureScript goes a long way towards curing JavaScript fatigue, however at it’s edges dangerous monsters still lurk. Third Party JavaScript integration via Externs, Module Splitting, Dead Code Elimination, and performance profiling often catch the unwary. Production builds often become complex and fragile to avoid these dangers.

In this talk I’ll show how to navigate the treacherous parts of ClojureScript and the landmarks to use for orientation. The current roadmap for bleeding edge features like externs inference and building dependencies from NPM will also be discussed.

April

Negotiating Salary for Women in Tech

Women Techmakers Montreal - April 1-2nd - Montreal, QC - Ashley Quinto Powell

One of the possible reasons for the wage gap is that women don’t negotiate, starting from our first job offer. I am excited to share the ins and outs of negotiating salary from the first job offer, to one you’ve had for some time, and want to cover both consulting gigs and full time employment.

Get talking with Actions on Google

GDG Madison - April 15th - Madison, WI - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Let your users be the voice talent with Actions on Google. Learn how to design, develop, and distribute rich conversational experiences with Node.js. We’ll show you how to approach voice-driven, natural language interactions with API.AI’s powerful bot platform.

Elm Workshop For Rails Developers

RailsConf - April 25-27th - Phoenix, AZ - Brad Grzesiak

Learn to write in Elm, an exciting new front-end language that lets you to write predictable and productive functionality in the browser. Elm is a functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript and prohibits runtime crashes. After a brief introduction to syntax and semantics, we'll pair off and begin building our first Elm application: a cooperative starship shooter game… with Rails backend, of course! Topics to be covered include: the amazingly helpful compiler, how to construct your own types, WebSockets, JSON parsing, and functional programming concepts.

May

Negotiating Salary for Women in Tech

MinneWebCon - May 1-2nd - Minneapolis, MN - Ashley Quinto Powell

I am excited to share the ins and outs of negotiating salary from the first job offer, to one you’ve had for some time, and will cover both consulting gigs and full time employment. This is a subject that I, and other women in tech, feel very passionately about. We may be savvy developers, but we don’t always know how to approach a negotiating table. We aren’t sure what we should ask for or how we should ask for it- and overwhelmingly, we just don’t ask for more than we’re offered. We see the effect this has on women from their first job- if women don’t negotiate the first job offer, we make less on subsequent raises, and then our next employer bases the next offer on our salary history, and we’re beat.

June

Coopetition: Cooperation in Today’s Competitive Tech Consulting Marketplace

RubyConf Kenya - Jun 8-10th - Nairobi, Kenya - James Corey

Google I/O Recap

GDG Madison - June 15th - Madison, WI - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Experience highlights from the May 2017 Google I/O developer festival. Every spring, Google invites thousands of developers to a three-day festival where Google engineers and product managers teach technical skills, share insights, and announce new developer products. Abraham and Pearl will be there and they’re excited to tell you what they learned.

July

Get the Power of Native with Progressive Web Apps

MadJS - July 10th - Madison, WI - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

As developers, we want to create apps that engage users across multiple devices. But building native apps is costly and cumbersome. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the power of native apps with the ease of building and deploying web apps. Learn to craft PWA experiences using new web standards, including service workers, push notifications, and homescreen access.

Getting Started with the Twitter API

CoderCruise - July 16-23rd - Western Caribbean - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Learn from the author of TwitterOAuth how to quickly integrate your application with the Twitter API. We will show you how to speed up onboarding with “Sign in with Twitter” authentication, bootstrap profiles with Twitter identities, and increase reach with quick publishing to user timelines. We’ll go over some basic do’s and don’ts of the Twitter API and show how easy it is to integrate using the TwitterOAuth open source library.

Get the Power of Native with Progressive Web Apps

CoderCruise - July 16-23rd - Western Caribbean - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

As developers, we want to create apps that engage users across multiple devices. But building native apps is costly and cumbersome. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the power of native apps with the ease of building and deploying web apps. Learn to craft PWA experiences using new web standards, including service workers, push notifications, and home screen access.

Web Components: Lego bricks of the web

CoderCruise - July 16-23rd - Western Caribbean - Abraham Williams & Pearl Latteier

Writing the same login form over and over again? Web components offer a modular approach to creating reusable UI widgets. Ditch large, complex frameworks and drop these lightweight building blocks into your site. We will show you how to build custom elements and introduce you to the existing elements and tools available from Google’s Polymer Project.