JavaScript can be a passive-aggressive and fickle language that frustrates you at every turn. It lets you do things like declare variables anywhere, but doesn’t tell you that it will hoist them while you’re not looking. JavaScript’s 'this' keyword is anything but, and eval can turn good code to evil fast. In this session, we will discuss common JavaScript headaches and mistakes and fun ways to avoid them. Learn what can trick you, like JavaScript scoping, or the ever elusive data types, and how JS organizes data and functions. Or that there is an actual ES6 'class' keyword, and you can write OOP systems in JavaScript!
This talk is fun but full of true tales of tragedies, failed projects, bad code, and other crazy things that software engineers, designers, and pointy-haired bosses everywhere do. Have you been on a project death march, or a project you knew was a train wreck? Perhaps you've seen code that defies all logic? Have you measured code quality by the number of "WTFs per minute"? Whether it's ruining the integrity of a database, or eating up all the available memory on a machine, every day we see engineers and architects making spectacularly bad choices, and can only wonder why. Some of the things they do are nearly unbelievable! The language doesn't matter, nor does the vendor. It happens in C# and C++, VB and Ruby, Delphi and DBase, and everywhere else. In this session, you'll see some high-speed train wrecks of projects as witnessed by the speaker's decades in the industry. Like the time when someone checked an entire VM into source code control, or when a manager deployed web sites straight to production, without testing, passing by QA. It is these kind of developer dysfunctions that happen just as someone says "But it works on my machine!" Incompetence abounds, and now is your chance to be entertained by it, rather than having to deal with it yourself.
Rachel currently works for Microsoft on Azure Functions. She has been in the business of creating software for over 25 years, as an author, mentor, and speaker at top industry conferences such as VSLive!, DevConnections, Øredev, NDC and SDD. During her career, she has worked on projects of all sizes from the smallest of apps, to the largest enterprise systems at some of the world’s leading companies.
Rachel’s expertise is in web development on the Microsoft stack, specifically Azure Functions, ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, SignalR, C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Her hobbies include science, AI, reading, languages, and travel.
