MagnoliaJS 2023 - Recap

I recently attended MagnoliaJS, the premiere web dev conference in Mississippi. I’m lucky enough to be close, personal friends with both the founder and current organizers of the conference and was able to bring a group from C Spire to join in the event. The conference began on Tuesday, October 17 at the Mississippi Museum of Art, with a strong encouragement to create content. This blog post, this blog, and my social media presence were validated by Taylor Desseyn’s first talk, and so I was doubly encouraged to share these notes so that others might be able to glean something from the time I spent in the company of web developers.

Day 1

Taylor Desseyn, Content Creation 101

persuasive speech on the networking benefits of creating content on social media

Alex Riviere, Small Design Systems for Developers

6 types of design systems Design token code generators

Rizel Scarlett, Emerging tech to improve diversity

• defining privilege doesn’t mean you didn’t earn your achievements
• tech identified as creating equity
  • containers
  • AI code generation
  • Decentralization

Angie Jones, Refactoring the Web

• the missing layer: identity
• Web5 = Web2 + Web3

Jaimin Patel, D3.js: Changing the way people do cancer research

• visualization of cancer mutations
• D3.js provides SVG creation APIs

Karl Groves, Everything you need to know about JavaScript Accessibility

• GitHub Repo used for live coding exercise

Tyler Clark, Getting the Job… Tips For Your Next React Interview Challenge

1. Be proactive in your career, not reactive
2. Network Network Network
3. Breakdown job descriptions
4. Understand your code, sometimes less is more
5. After fundamentals, learns tradeoffs and patterns

Pato Vargas, From Chaos to Order: How React Monorepos Can Simplify Your Codebase

• Monorepo tooling; Pato uses nx

Danielle Maxwell, To Micro-Frontend or Not to Micro-Frontend: 5 Questions to Ask First

• I think this is an architectural talk?

Taylor Desseyn (reprise), A Manifesto in Hiring

• don’t be an asshole
• do what you say you will
• show you are capable of being prepared

Noteworthy events

• Kenia won the art giveaway
• Abbey Perini won the costume contest as Tech Conference Barbie
• Nick Wallace catering was fire

Day 2

Chris DeMars, Accessibility in the Enterprise: The Relationship between A11y and ROI

• numeronym
• Web accessibility means that everyone can use the web
• 3 things that come last:
  • Accessibility
  • Performance
  • Security
• questions
  • Does it work on all screen readers?
  • can i solely use a keyboard?
  • Does the color contrast work for all users?
  • Do the images have alt attributes?
  • why should i care?

Mo Daniel, How to Learn Technical Skills Effectively

• Continual learning
  • Increases adaptability
  • Maintains skills

Five steps to learn effectively

1. Have a goal in mind
2. Master the fundamentals
   1. Project based learning
3. Practice
4. Strengthen your weaknesses
5. Work with people with more experience

Blake Watson, The Joys of Home-Cooked Apps

• home-cooked apps are about redefining success
• A Fine Start
• DSL caretaker time sheets

Mark Noonan, a whale of a tale about front-end testing

• Unit and Component Tests
  • Unit tests document the purpose of a function
  • ‘Component tests document the purpose of a component and its variations
• Component tests are useful for discovering accessibility issues
  • Lowest level for testing quickly
  • Written by engineers who have the most knowledge of what and why the DOM is the way it is
• End-to-end and component tests
  • Component tests are often “vertical”
  • E2E tests are often “horizontal”
• Network stubbing benefits e2e testing and dev in parallel
• API testing
  • When using mocked APIs, use API testing to validate the mocks against the real API
• Balance trade-offs between different testing schemes

Michael Liendo, Moonlighting as a developer

• Side hustle guidelines
  • Come with a plan
  • Communicate with your manager
  • Create separate social accounts
• Side hustle tool box
  • Calendly
  • Stripe
  • Carrd

Abbey Perini, Cognitive Load and your development environment

• Memory and cognition are finite resources
• Instructional design
• CodeClimate

Nerando Johnson, Unloacked: Growing Your Skills Through Open Source Development and Civic Hacking

• Ushahidi platform (Kenyan)
• Hack the City (Finnish)
• BudgIT (Nigerian)
• Code for America
• getCTG.org
• Code for Atlanta
  • Marta.js
  • Georgia Courtbot

Todd Libby, Deceptive Patterns and FAST

• Deceptive is not anti-pattern
• Molly Holzschlag

Noteworthy events (pt 2)

• Noonan’s presentation had a cast of characters
• Kevin won some socks
• Nicole won a Bluetooth speaker
• Dylan won a Bluetooth speaker
• Because everyone from C Spire but me won something, Kayla felt bad and gave me a candle
• More Nick Wallace heat with slow cooked pork roast

Thank you for reading

These notes may or may not mean anything to you and that is okay. For making it this far, I’d like to reward you with the relevant social media asset to this experience.

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