Bonn Agile Tech Talk - March 2016: JavaScript

After having talked about Coworking Bonn at the February meetup, Ralph Grundmann invited us to Bonn Poppelsdorf and hosted the March meetup. The location is perfect for a meetup of 20-30 people! We were also given a tour and Coworking Bonn really seems like an awesome place to work. Check out the website, take a look at some pictures and check the pricing plans. Thanks Ralph for your hospitality!

First up was Jan Owen with his talk about the evolution of modularization in JavaScript. Starting with IIFEs, he presented the differences between AMD, CommonJS (and how it's used in npm or with browserify) and ECMAScript6 modules (and how they can be used with Babel or SystemJS). Check out his slides.

Jan Owen (@Gnitter)

Then Sebastian Mancke talked about ECMAScript6. He showed that the new features are just syntactic changes by transpiling them to ES5 using the Babel REPL. He introduced classes, closures, template strings, modules, and finally showed a private project where he used vue.js. Take a look at his presentation.

Sebastian Mancke (smancke)

Finally, Gregor Anders gave an in-depth introduction to TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain ES5/6 JavaScript. Conceived by Microsoft, now a company that embraces Open Source and standards, TypeScript adds a type system to JavaScript so you can write code that is more maintainable - its intention is not to "fix" JavaScript! Gregor also mentioned DefininitelyTyped, a repository for high quality TypeScript modules.

Gregor Anders (gregoranders)

We had about 25 attendees, (some traveled as far as from Dortmund or Mannheim) who eagerly listened to our three talks and discussed intensely. Great to have so many skilled people who contributed to a high-quality dialogue.

Dank @bonnagile gestern einen super informativen Abend im @coworkingbn mit @gnitter zu JS Modulen, Sebastian Mancke zu Babel vue.js und ...

— Flo (@0815_adventure) March 23, 2016

JavaScript-Paket aus NPM entfernt: Node, Babel und Co. scheiterten beim Build. Dank @bonnagile verstehe ich das. :) https://t.co/emzVFbdV5U

— Sascha Foerster (@Sascha_Foerster) March 23, 2016

As Coworking Bonn is located in the heart of Bonn Poppelsdorf, we easily moved the dialogue to the Gesindehaus for another 90 minutes. It was totally insightful, great fun and we were happy to see many new faces.

Join us again in April, where Bonn Agile will join Scrumtisch Bonn for a dialogue on the Agile community Bonn. Make sure to follow us on Xing, Meetup and Twitter for the announcement!