It’s summer! Time for me to hit the road and give some tech talks.
For O’Reilly’s Fluent 2012 in San Francisco, May 29-31, I’ll be talking about JavaScript Parser Infrastructure for Code Quality Analysis (Thu 1:45pm). If you know me and some of my latest activities, you probably can guess what this is all about. I’m excited about this because it is the first Fluent conference, no doubt there will be a lot of important JavaScript folks there. The short description of this talk is as follows.
Modern web frameworks, libraries, and applications will grow to be more complex. Maintaining the quality of such complex system is far from trivial. However, the currently available tools do not grow fast enough to accomodate the exploding need for advanced code quality analysis, likely due to the lack of the building blocks to build such high-level tools. One of the missing blocks is a future-looking JavaScript parser. This talk discusses the development of Esprima, a new JavaScript parser designed from the ground-up to be readable, high performant, easily extensible and able to accommodate future ES Harmony features. Since the parser output is a simple JSON-formatted AST, a few further tools have been built, among others source minification and rewriting, function tracing, static analyzer, run-time complexity profiling, and many more.
Another O’Reilly conference in the pipeline is the high-profile Velocity 2012. Just like last year, it is held in Santa Clara, June 25-27. This time, my talk is titled Understanding Hardware Acceleration on Mobile Browsers (Tue 5:20 pm), with the following abstract:
GPU acceleration on mobile browsers, if it is leveraged correctly, can lead to a smooth and fluid applications, thus improving the user experience. There has been a lot of mentions and best practices of hardware acceleration these days, although so far it has been pretty general and hasn’t provided much technical direction apart from simple magical advice such as “use translate3d”. This talk sheds some more light on browser interactions with the GPU and explain what happens behind the scenes, covering the topic of acceleration of primitive drawing, the use of tiled backing store, and composited layer. Knowing the actual machinery behind hardware acceleration, you will be in the position to plan your strategy to improve the performance of your web application.
Now, if you live in Europe and for some reason can’t make it to any of these conferences, don’t lose hope yet. There’s Dutch Mobile Conference in Amsterdam (June 6-9) where I will be presenting the similar variants of the above two talks, under the track Understanding Hardware Acceleration on Mobile Browsers and Strategies for End-to-End Web Apps Testing. I’ve been to Amsterdam once (quiz: does anyone remember for what it was?), I can’t wait to get to try rijsttafel again!
If you will be around in any of these places, drop by and say hello!