Announcing: “Learn JavaScript Deeply” Track

Screenshot 2016-01-06 12.49.31During his “State of the Word”, Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Auttomatic) gave the WordPress community “homework” to “learn JavaScript deeply” (click here to watch the video – the mention is 59:00 minutes into the video) Matt claimed that it’s the future of the web, and WordCamp Miami believes that as well. To that end, WordCamp Miami is devoting it’s entire developer’s track on Sunday to JavaScript education.

This track is for any and all developers who want to improve their JavaScript knowledge. This track is great for those who are just starting to get a handle on JavaScript. There is also material for more advanced developers who have a solid knowledge, but need to know how to move forward. The track will cover everything from basic developer tools to advanced JavaScript concepts to JS frameworks to how to apply more advanced concepts to WordPress development. Although WordPress is discussed in a few talks, the track contains mountains of knowledge and tips for any JavaScript developers regardless if you use WordPress or not.

The “Learn JavaScript Deeply” track will be on Sunday, February 21st. It is a full-day track.

Although we haven’t yet posted our weekend schedule, we are proud to showcase the following planned speakers and the talks they will be covering.

Camden Segal

Camden is a developer at WebDevStudios where he is the resident Javascript guru and is pretty good at WordPress too I guess. Camden began his career as a developer at the age of 7, aiming to debut on the AOL Kids Only Games section. The sting of rejection failed to deter Camden – he went on to sell over $1500 in weapons on Second Life when he was in middle school. Eventually, Camden came to his senses and majored in Studio Arts at Bard College, and has utilized his degree extensively in his postgraduate career. In his free time Camden is an independent game designer and helps run the Philly Game Forge, a co-working space for game developers.

Talk: “Modern Javascript Workflows for WordPress”: The modern JavaScript ecosystem is evolving at an incredible pace. Every day there are new frameworks, tools, and ideas that push JavaScript development a little further.

Josh will walk you through the concepts behind tools like NPM, Browserify, ES2015, and Babel, their basic usage. If you are a WordPress developer we will show how to best integrate them with WordPress’s built in systems. Even if you aren’t a WordPress developer, this talk will introduce you to tools that you should be using for your JavaScript development.

Nizar Khalife Iglesias

Hi, I’m Nizar. I’m the Lead Instructor at IronHack Miami and have been a Web developer for over 8 years. I teach people what coding is and how to code. I also write software for the server, command-line and browser, usually in my preferred language: JavaScript. I love learning and speaking about code and I try to stay active in developer meetups in South Florida.
Aside from that, I’m from Puerto Rico and I enjoy video games, film and cookies. I try to say funny things and often fail.

Talk: “Advanced Topics of JavaScript”: If you’ve done even a little bit of JavaScript, you know that its has it’s fair share of quirks. In particular, functions in JavaScript do a lot of strange things. Rather than be a victim of the bizarre history of the Web, Nizar is here cut through the metaphorical jungle of the JavaScript function.

In this hands on workshop, you will learn about the nuances of functions in JavaScript. We will discuss what it means for functions to be first-class citizens in a language, what function scope is, the mysterious “this” keyword and some of the implications of all these things. Don’t forget your machete.

Josh Pollock

Josh, is a WordPress plugin developer, educator and entrepreneur. He is the owner of CalderaWP, makers of Caldera Forms, and a co-founder of Ingot, the easiest A/B testing solution for WordPress. In addition he is a contributor to WordPress core, the WordPress REST API, and plugins by Foo Plugins, Postmatic, Pods, Aesop Interactive, WordImpress, GravityView and more.

One of Josh’s favorite things to do is to share what he has learned about WordPress plugin development, business and community. He writes regularly for Torque Magazine and has contributed to other top WordPress tutorial sites including, Smashing Magazine, Tuts+, and WPBeginner. He is also the author of the book The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress REST API.

Talk: “Intro to AngularJS”: AngularJS is a wonderful tool, extending the conventions of HTML5 that we all know and love, for building dynamic web applications. This beginner talk will provide you with a basic understanding of Angular templates, controllers, directives and factories. It will prepare you to get started with Angular and use it to build awesome interfaces connected to a RESTful API, such as the WordPress REST API.

Zac Gordon

Zac Gordon is currently preparing the JavaScript for WordPress Master Course. Previously, Zac taught WordPress for Treehouse, the online technology school. Zac has years of experience teaching WordPress and JavaScript at the high school and college level. In addition to teaching, Zac also runs Web Hosting for Students.

Talk: “Use Cases for JavaScript Frameworks”: In this talk, WordPress educator Zac Gordon goes over many of the popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks (jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Angular and React) and discusses various use cases for each one. Of course, the talk also includes emphasis on some vanilla JS knowledge a WordPress dev should have.

Bruno Cunha

Bruno Cunha is a self-taught front-end developer working at EarlyShares, where he helps build platforms for crowdfunding commercial real estate. A Miami native, Bruno likes contributing to the local tech community – most recently, he gave a talk for the Miami Ruby Brigade on JavaScript for Rails Developers, as well as a two-part talk for the Front-End Developers of Miami on mob programming using TDD and JavaScript. He loves building modern and performant interfaces and happily welcomes any challengers to a battle in Super Smash Bros.

Talk: “Intro to React”: React is a popular JavaScript library by Facebook for building dynamic user interfaces. In this introduction, we’ll cover component-based application structure, React basics, and next steps. A basic understanding of JavaScript is recommended so you can follow along as we live code our first React Component!

Kevin Stover

Kevin is the co-founder and CTO of WP Ninjas, the creators of the Ninja Forms plugin. He’s been working in WordPress for over six years and studied desktop development before jumping into developing for the web. He has a wife, a one year old daughter, and a Master’s Degree, and nearly a PhD, in Roman Military history from the University of Liverpool.

Talk: “My Experience Converting a WordPress Plugin to a Backbone App”: It starts out innocently enough; you need to hide a div in your plugin admin screen, so you go to Google and type something like: jQuery hide element. Then, you realize that you also need to change the text of one of your h3 tags when the user selects a specific option. You keep telling yourself that this is the last time, but you’ve already done it. You’ve created a big heaping mess of jQuery spaghetti. Your JS file is now hundreds of lines of code snippets that show and hide elements, change HTML text, swap out input values, and anything else that you need to make your plugin admin “dynamic.” We’ve all been there; there’s no shame in admitting it. In WordPress, often the JS that drives our interfaces is an after thought. I’ve cooked up jQuery spaghetti more times than I care to say.

In this session, I’ll share my experiences in converting a popular WordPress plugin, Ninja Forms, from a PHP/HTML plugin to a mostly JS application. We’ll talk about the tools and technologies that we’ve used to avoid the dreaded pasta of bad code, along with how we overcame some WordPress-specific challenges. We’ll cover how we to plan and build a data-driven user interaction, rather than a reactive, snippet-driven mess.


More Speakers and Surprises To Come!

Speakers are being added to the above lineup and they’ll be announced in a few days along with our weekend schedule.

Speakers will be sharing all the code online. For this unique and exclusive rack, there will also be a Q&A at the end of the day for those with questions. It’s a perfect time to get the feedback and suggestions from a group of experienced developers. No question is too basic or small! There will also be a section of the schedule dedicated to speakers sharing the best resources so you can continue your education after the conference. A Slack channel (click here to signup) will be provided exclusively for developers at the conference so you can virtually meet developers before the conference… and follow up with them after the conference as well.

More information and surprises concerning WordCamp Miami’s “Learn JavaScript Deeply” track will be announced the closer we get to the conference. We are looking forward to educating the local community and hope this starts a trend of knowledgable workshops and tracks in future WordCamps in 2016!

Grab your weekend ticket now to make sure you can attend. Developers should also come to our BuddyCamp Developers workshop on Friday, Feb. 19th!