Fluent Conference 2014 Complete Video Collection; O'Reilly Media

16 June 2014

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this work under the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.

So I’m not a web developer, just an interested amateur. I know a little HTML, a smattering of JavaScript, and a few tidbits of jQuery, plus some backend stuff (Node/Express) with which I have limited facility. I had two goals in reviewing this collection, which includes every keynote, tutorial and session talk from the Fluent conference put on by O’Reilly:

1. Get a sense of what’s happening at the forefront of web development. I probably share this with the majority of actual attendees.
2. Learn something new from the in-depth tutorials. Given that I’m starting at a lower baseline, this may have been a stretch.

The result? I really enjoyed the talks. For the most part, speakers are engaging and clear. I watched all the keynotes, most of the tutorials, and a smattering of session talks aligned with my own interests. High points included:

• Mark Bates’s AngularJS tutorial. I can’t say I absorbed everything at one go, but this opinionated tutorial gave me a much better sense of how angular is organized and how to structure my learning.
• Sasha Goldstein’s “Attacking Web Applicatons.” Engaging, approachable for beginners, and freaking terrifying.
• Moh Haghighat, “Closing the Web Platform Gap with Native” (cf. Eich’s keynote). Mostly for getting me excited about the future performance possibilities of the JavaScript VM.

Less good points:

• I was really excited about John Williams’s D3 tutorial, but couldn’t make it through. I’ve done some reading on D3, and was hoping for a bigger-picture look at how the library and its syntax are put together — effectively, how to “think” D3 —but that wasn’t the approach he seemed to be taking.
• Price point: I loved the content, but to be honest, I don’t think I would have paid the several hundred dollars this collection cost (similar to the actual conference pricing). Might be more reasonable for professionals or those whose employers are paying.

All told, though, a great resource for getting up to speed on trends in web development.