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Notes from CascadiaJS 2020

Some of my favorite talks, highlights, and things I found interesting from CascadiaJS 2020. Additionally, links to all of the talks can be found at the bottom of this post.

Day 1 Highlights

• Modal Windows for Everyone shared some great ideas around implementing modals that I hadn’t really thought about previously like “trapping focus” within the modal, hooking CSS to aria-attributes to force their usage by future maintainers, and wiring scrims in an accessible way. This was probably my favorite talk of the conference.

• I18N | L10N - The Principals for a more Accessible Web talked about internalization & localization, but my big take-away from this talk was the last 5 minutes where he went through the Intl object which gives you a bunch of internationalization utility methods like:
  .DateTimeFormat with (dateStyle,timeStyle,formatRange),
  .RelativeTimeFormat,
  .ListFormat,
  & .DisplayNames
  and Temporal which is in the process of joining the language and lets you do stuff that you historically needed to use libraries like Moment.js/Day.js.

• Understanding Accessibility as a Concept talked about accessibility broadly and shared some tools around testing accessibility that I hadn’t heard of before like WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool & the Web Accessibility VS Code Extension.

• Memory Leaks and the Havoc They Wreak gave a general overview of memory leaks in JS and how to start going about debugging them.

Day 2 Highlights

• The Zen of Git walks through what is happening under the hood when you use git and what the various commands are doing behind the scenes.

• Musical Creativity in the Browser was a really neat talk about connecting instruments to the internet using the Web Midi API

• Complex Geometry in HTML! - The talk itself was fairly in the weeds, but the demos were really really cool.
  ・3D game written entirely in vanilla JS, HTML & CSS ( play it | github )
  ・a really cool Mario Cart demo

Video time stamps for every talk

Day 1 - Video
Opening Message About Racial Justice - Claudius Mbemba
Mo’Problems, Mo’Nads - Kyle “Getify” Simpson
Modal Windows for Everyone - James Steinbach
The Past, Present, and Future of Favicons - Tiger Oakes
I18N | L10N - The Principals for a more Accessible Web - Romulo Cintra
Understanding Accessibility as a Concept - Jemima Abu
Memory Leaks and the Havoc They Wreak - Will Klein
Saving Data to the DWeb: A Primer and a Practical Perspective - Kelsey Breseman
Human Centered On-Call Practices - Najla Elmachtoub
Developing Your Community Brand - Joel Hooks
The ACID/BASE Conundrum - Sangeetha KP
The Operating System of You - Shawn Wang

Day 2 - Video
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let the Robot Publish to NPM - Evan Tahler
The Zen of Git - Tianyu Pu
Musical Creativity in the Browser - Scott Ammon
Complex Geometry in HTML! A story of Constrained Creativity - Pantelis Kalogiros
SVG, Canvas, and WebGL: The Power, The Beauty, & The Cost - Amber Hoak
Building Better Communities with Mental Health Support - Rahat Chowdhury
You Might Not Need a Build Step - Kristofer Joseph
My Assistant Misty - April Speight
Relax, it’s IoTea Time! - Myriam E Walden-Duarte
How I Graduated from React to Vanilla JavaScript - Dan McKeon
Oh Sweet, Gif - Rachelle Rathbone
Snowpack, Webpack and the Third Age of JavaScript - Fred K Schott