Just kidding.

My friend at Apple taught me that.

How is everyone doing tonight?

[ Applause ] It's like 2:00 in the morning.

You did it.

I so, backstage they have like a makeup station and the sound guy is like, oh, do you need

makeup?

I think I have enough going on here?

Do I look good?

Of course I do.

Anyway.

Along with that and the layout and aggressiveness of this slide, I think that should set the

tone for the rest of the talk.

So, despite what Lori said in his talk this morning, I'm not talking about WebAssembly.

I think they misread the schedule.

That's actually Max's talk which is moved to tomorrow.

So, please check it out.

I'm here today to talk about package managers.

I'm just kidding.

[ Laughter ] Oh!

Oh!

And before I go on, I know this counts towards a ton of my talk.

Where is Keith Kurson?

Is Keith here?

Oh, here.

Happy birthday, Keith.

[ Applause ] Cool.

Clapping, a round of applause for the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for having me tonight.

Which was supposed to be a talk I called JavaScript considered useful.

But then I saw that the conference schedule had my talk this late.

And so, I switched things up a bit.

So, thank you for sticking around this late for the first episode and maybe last of my

new hit show "JavaScript After Dark."

Night time is a time to reflect on the past day.

Like, did we feel productive?

Did we meet our goals of meeting new people?

Saying hi to old friends?

Not drinking too much coffee?

Who here drank too much coffee?

Did we learn some new stuff from the talks today?

Like how capitalism is bad, right?

Wow.

It's also a time to reflect on those moments we can't ever take back.

Whose flashbacks keep us up at night.

Important and impactful meaningful moments like this time a woman asked me in lower Manhattan

three years ago at that red X there where the Chase bank was.

And I said I didn't know.

But it turns out we were literally in front of a Chase bank.

I think about it every night.

Tonight, we're going reflect on some just as insomnia inducing past and present moments

of JS.

The language, the community and me.

Tonight, I am your tall shadowy figure hovering over you above sleep paralysis.

Now, we're not going to reflect on the birth of JavaScript 23 years ago.

There's a wealth of content online you can read about.

How it came to be.

And it wasn't even the most exciting thing to happen in 1995.

That, of course, goes to Space Hog's debut album, if you're into British glam rock.

Oasis released what's the story morning glory.

But that's just as uninteresting to me tonight as the JavaScript origin story.

I bet you didn't think that someone from outside the world of package managers would be bringing

the hottest takes to the JavaScript conference.

But here we are.

The only year in the past that we are going to talk about is probably the most impactful

to all of us tonight and that is ten years ago.

That is 2009.

I know a lot of math.

So, what were JavaScript, the community and I up to in 2009?

And how we all have collectively grown up since.

So, let's explore.

In 2009, JavaScript had just about started getting use to the actually being useful.

Both for normals and nerds.

The iPhone had only been out for about two years.

So, the idea of JavaScript in everyone's pockets was real.

But it was still in its infancy.

Not a lot of people knew.

And it had been about four years since AJAX had come about.

And I think stronger than dirt is a pretty good bar to reach for scripting languages.

In part with AJAX, web 2.0 was evolving from user interactions like shit posting comments,

to collaboration and real time shit posting comments with Google wave.

They reprogrammed the algorithm that most use today like Glitch.

So, honestly, haters of Google Wave can eat it.

GitHub and StackOverflow were about a year old.

And the most popular JavaScript questions from that year were a reflection of the language's

youth and complexity.

Which nearly matched that of the social construct of time which to this day we still have issues

with in JavaScript.

Prototype, jQuery, all a few years old.

It's about the user interface, baby.

I'm sorry, I cringe whenever I hear that.

For the client side, there wasn't much besides the cringy taglines and logos.

Entirely exciting or dramatic going on.

And to be fair, this is the year before backbone was released.

So, there was no real framework wars in sight yet.

It would be another year before Steve Jobs would release his viral YouTube video/open

letter, thoughts on Flash.

By the way, Flash ends of life next year.

So, rich people and blogging males weren't quite yet talking about HTML5 as if it were

like an actual brand new language literally to solve every problem yet.

It was a simpler, softer, more down to Earth time for the document object model and those

of us fucking around with it.

But that's not to say that 2009 was without excitement or even conflict and drama.

Shouts out to the TC39 panel a little bit earlier.

It looked a lot different back then.

Looked a lot different last year.

They were having a tough time coming to a resolution to a debate that I will summarize

as I do most in the community, grownups fighting on blogs instead of saying it to their faces.

Blogs, for the unfamiliar, it was how people put long threads of Tweets into a single page,

by the way.

RIP.

And TC39 for those that missed the panel, it was great panel.

It's a technical committee to which large companies pay 70K or more dollars to join.

And what does or doesn't change with JavaScript the language.

It appears that in 2009 the committee of the pulling a weekend at Bernie's with the math

icon John Von Neumann.

Fun fact, Neumann invented merge sort, the second best sorting algorithm next to Jortsort.

I don't know.

Maybe this is what TC39 was fighting about.

Honestly, it was one of the least interesting things I was reading about in 2009.

But to be fair, there was a lot of competition in being interesting.

Remember, Google Wave came out that year.

And by the way, it's hard not to see some irony in the year collaboration was disrupted,

some dudes from large companies had a hard time collaborating with each other.

Maybe that's the hardest problem in computer science.

But if you stare directly into the sun, you may find it interesting that the resolution

of this particular conflict was the committee renaming ECMAScript 3.1 to ECMAScript fifth

edition.

The version, one point, nine points, is a huge thing back thing.

It was a few years later that TC39 had another conflict and moved up the version 2009 points.

Obviously, an homage to the 2009 renaming.

Numerologists should be all over this shit.

Most of the news about JavaScript 2009 was not about JavaScript, but about browsers who

were all allegedly the best.

Stallman was mad about open source.

And, yeah, some things haven't changed.

Companies tracking us.

So, you know, we knew.

We were warned.

But the most exciting news you would agree in the JavaScript cannon for developers was

the founding of the modern JavaScript specification and the release of NodeJS a few months later.

Whoo, yeah.

Whoo.

So, like 2009 was like a growth spurt year.

Our youthful and complex JavaScript was finally going through puberty.

You know who wasn't going through puberty?

Me.

I was 24 years old in 2009.

And if you go off my Tweets from that year alone, I was dealing with excruciating wisdom

tooth pain which I couldn't afford to fix because I was broke as fuck.

So, I took recreational drugs to curb the pain instead and expressed myself on the Internet

and doing so.

I was in Rob Thomas and deleting the Internet before that became cool.

And I freaking loved Yahoo!

Pipes.

Shouts out.

What would probably surprise you, I was not writing much JavaScript.

I was in graduate school working on my master’s in computer science and my last year's courses

were virtually all mathematics.

And when not writing pages and pages of pure math, quite beautifully, I must add, I was

programming in R. Who here knows R?

So, for those of you who are unfamiliar with R, it's similar to S. Very self explanatory.

[ Laughter ] I had a lot of odd jobs back then.

But my most fulfilling was teaching non technical college students how to use Excel at 7 a.m.

I love this review from them who said the class topics themselves are really boring.

But it's not like she invented Microsoft Office and forced it upon us.

I did not invent Microsoft Office, but I did create the curriculum.

So, yeah.

7 a.m.

Fun times.

I have no idea what StackOverflow or GitHub were.

And those sites are probably not even actively considering me a part of their target core

demographic.

I was a young white woman studying computer science, stats and linear algebra in a state

school in New Jersey.

In 2009 that was like the conventional path to becoming a software engineer if you were

broke and living on your own and the only person in your family to go to college.

I don't think there were any web developer bootcamps in 2009.

And most higher education engineering programs were using Java and C++ and to this day to

teach programming at an applicable level.

JavaScript was copying and pasting from cool sites and blogs I liked to look at and follow

using Google Reader.

Remember?

I do.

Googlers in here, I remember what you did.

Also, I want to shouts out to my old D and D crew.

Brian Brennans here.

I forgot to take my D and D handbook and my glittery dice out of the shop before I took

it.

And the elephant says PHP.

PHP is JavaScript with question marks.

[ Laughter ] I did a lot of really shitty part time freelance

web design and development.

Yes, design.

With a wide range of low or no paying clients and most of that development work was written

in PHP.

Which is way prettier than the designs I was expected to come up with.

So, yeah, my then boyfriend's dad's friend's real estate company who didn't pay me learned.

Joan Osborne, Grammy nominated singer, performer, of what is God is one was us hated what I

designed.

And the movie baby geniuses was adapted from.

He was sick as fuck.

He hate what had I designed.

But as my friend said when his kid vomited on him, tough, but fair.

I didn't Tweet about JavaScript until 2010.

Far from helpful.

I shan't be purchasing this services from you.

To me, programming community let alone JavaScript community didn't really exist.

Programming in general didn't exist outside of the classroom and maybe in a couple of

channels.

And this one mailing list I participated in about my favorite operating system, open Solaris.

Pour one out for that.

While TC39 was arguing about whatever they were arguing about in 2009, Oracle was buying

Sun microsystems.

With that was the end of the Open Solaris project.

I was heartbroken and still pissed at Oracle.

You know what else died in 2009?

GeoCities.

Yeah.

So, this may seem hella dramatic.

But I was basically watching everything important to me about open source and building the web

being destroyed in a very tiny bubble that was very far and very different from the bubble

that I am in today which is the JavaScript community.

The JavaScript community, what many of us call the communities, what we see here tonight.

Young, we think of JSConf, the family conferences and EU.

And this conference started in 2009 in response to or after the inaugural JSConf US earlier

this year.

You may recognize the organizers.