Front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue are making big waves in software development. Microsoft makes great tooling for working with JS frameworks like those in the form of Visual Studio Code. There is also a large trove of information and tutorials getting setup inside the VS Code environment. One specific resource I really appreciated was Cory House’s Pluralsight course on setting up a JS development environment.

Here is a common scenario for you. You’re building an application… any application. It could be your side project, a sales tool, an ecommerce site, a REST api, a video game, a reporting dashboard. Anything. You’re building your app, and you reach a point that you’d like to try it out, to see how it would look to a user. How do you simulate a production scenario with no data to test with? If you’re lucky, you have data from an existing customer you can use, or there is a sample dataset available online. If you’re unlucky, you’re left generating dummy data using garbage inputs (random strings, random numbers, etc) – data that passes the regex, but doesn’t provide a good simulation.

Annotated below is a presentation from Nik Molnar, co-founder of the open source debugging and diagnostics tool Glimpse, who demonstrates several different strategies for improving the performance of your web application. This is easily one of the most useful conference presentations I have ever seen and I wanted to share it with everyone. If were curious about how to do any of the following tasks, this presentation will cover those for you.

For the past three years, a group of very smart and very generous people, have hosted a wonderful summer camp themed conference in Wisconsin titled ‘That Conference’.   It’s hosted at a giant indoor/outdoor waterpark and convention center, Kalahari Resorts.  The number and quality of the sessions is impressive, and may shock you a bit when you consider the entire ticket cost is currently under $400.