Call for Speakers: October
Closed this issue · 4 comments
We're looking for speakers for our meetup!
How do I submit a talk?
You can either comment on this issue or send us an email at talks@wafflejs.com.
When and where will it be?
When: Wednesday, October 2 from 7 to 10 PM.
Where: Soma StrEat Food Park
What should I talk about?
We don’t have a strict formula, but this is the balance we try to strike every month:
- 2x Creative Talks: Creative applications of programming. Past examples are generating lego murals out of static images, and building an in-browser RPG.
- 1x Passion Talk: Something you’re excited about outside of work. Past examples are starting and maintaining an open source project, and using meditation and programming side by side.
- 1x Technical Talk: A deep dive on a technical topic. Past examples are optimizing your code for the V8 JavaScript engine, and using functional programming for developing UI.
Do I need to be an expert to talk?
Nope. This meetup is supposed to be fun and casual, so we want everyone to participate. We especially encourage people of underrepresented groups to apply.
How long should my talk be?
Ten minutes. There won't be any formal Q&A.
What should be in my talk submission?
We don’t have a strict formula for this either, but past successful submissions have included the following:
- What the audience should take away from the talk
- Why you’re excited about the subject
- A general outline of your talk (bullet points are good)
If you only have a rough idea, we’re also happy to workshop your idea with you on our Slack channel (#wafflejs).
Do I have to buy a ticket if I get selected?
Nope! You'll get a free ticket.
What's the A/V situation?
We'll have a projector and a mic for you to use. Let us know if you need any fancy adapters (we'll have some Apple ones).
Can I submit a talk for a thing I made, for either myself or my employer?
Generally, no. We've found that when people give talks about a thing they made, it comes off as self-promotional. We'll make exceptions for this though, especially when it's less about the thing, but rather lessons learned by making the thing.
Hi, submitting a talk proposal for October's event! Tentative title is "Growing JavaScript"
What the audience should take away from the talk: How programming languages evolve over time and how that relates to JavaScript’s evolution
Why I’m excited: I’ve loved the paper that inspired this idea, “Growing a Language” by Guy Steele for a while. I think it’s important for us to understand why a language is the way it is and why new features get added! It makes us more thoughtful engineers and think critically about our language choices.
Outline of my talk:
- What does having a language that can “grow” mean? Reference Guy Steele paper and how he explains the growth of Java
- To understand why this having a language that can grow is important, look at the examples Guy Steele referred to -- growing cities and languages
- Christopher Alexander (referenced in the paper) has a book on building cities called "A Pattern Language" -- the idea is to use these patterns as building blocks to build a city gradually, rather than coming up with a masterplan for a city all at once
- Similarly, in the English language, we use patterns to have an expressive language, and the community adds words over time (slang words that eventually make its way into the dictionary)
- This is actually pretty relevant to how JavaScript grows today! (TC39 committee, releasing a limited set of features each year, adapting very commonly used features from libraries like Lodash)
- So JavaScript is growable as a language. What's the point?
- JavaScript evolves based on our usage patterns, and the network effects of our patterns have long-lasting effects on how JavaScript develops as a language
- It's important to be vocal when we come up with novel uses, as it can lead to new features like async iteration, or being able to copy data structures efficiently using rest/spread operators.
- Most importantly, we as software engineers need to be critical of new feature releases to make sure JavaScript evolves to support patterns that enable growth and that it keeps evolving for the health of the JavaScript community
Hi! I'm interested in presenting about the Mercator projection and it's implication on rendering maps on the web!
What the audience should take away from the talk
Plotting points on a map is different from plotting on a regular flat xy plane, and you need to adjust for the curvature of the earth using the Mercator projection.
Why you’re excited about the subject
I ran into this issue myself and was super confused when I tried to debug plotting a geofence by putting the coordinates into a regular plotting grid and saw that the shape was different from what I had expected. It was such an aha moment for me to find out about the reason why.
A general outline of your talk (bullet points are good)
Title ideas: "Don't trust flat maps", "Mercator projection and it's implications on rendering maps"
-
History/What Is...
- Open Street Maps (OSM): volunteer led open source map data
- MapBox: leverages OSM to render maps in JS, provides extra functions, consumes geoJSON data for overlays
- Geofences: area on map
- Geojson: file format for defining geographical features like lines, points, polygons
-
Mercator projection
- Show interesting phenomenon:
- a group of lat/long pairs that seem to create a square geofence on a map will show up like a straight line if you simply set latitude as x and longitude as y and plot it
- Explanation:
- Earth is an ellipsoid, and the coordinates are projections from a rounded surface onto a flat one
- Fun example: Africa (close to equator) may look the same size as Greenland (close to north pole), but Africa is actually 14 times larger in surface area
- Optimizations for the web: most web applications use spherical approximation of the Earth instead of ellipsoid
- Show interesting phenomenon:
Thanks for the talks, they were both so great!