ThunderPlains is a web and mobile developer conference that focuses on Community, JavaScript and related tech that make the web interesting.
ThunderPlains is organized and backed by Techlahoma – a volunteer-run 501(c)3 non-profit. Techlahoma is dedicated to advancing Oklahomans through accessible tech training and community building.
Before attending the conference, please review the Thunder Plains Code of Conduct. The CoC applies to everyone (all attendees, speakers, volunteers, and vendors) at official and unofficial events by Techlahoma, including any location where attendees may be congregating.
Have questions? Please email us or alert us on Twitter. We're here to help!
Learning web development from scratch can be a daunting task. In addition to programming languages, there are all kinds of tools it seems you need to master just to get started: bundlers, taskrunners, package managers, transpilers… when and how did web development get to be so complicated? In this talk, we'll follow the evolution of a web page through time, introducing it to technical obstacles and innovations until we arrive at present day. We'll come away with a better appreciation for the problems our modern tools solve, and historical context for how the field has evolved.
Jory is a consultant and educator working to improve collaboration in open source and open standards communities as a member of several industry boards and standards setting organizations. She is sponsored by Bocoup to advocate for web developers on Ecma International's Executive Committee, the JS Foundation Technical Architecture Committee, the W3C Advisory Council, the MDN Product Advisory Board, and works on projects with Ecma TC39, Ecma TC53, and Web Platform Tests.
As a developer a certain set of skills, habits, and tools are needed to ship "secure" software. Set to the theme of the Oregon trail, this talk takes you down the developer trail, equipping you with new tools, making sure your team has built the right skills, and overcoming unknown challenges. Will you catch a virus from a 3rd party dependency, narrowly escape peer review, or make it to production unscathed? Find yourself on the developer trail.
Girls just wanna have fun … coding their own programmable jewelry! Jewelbots are the latest in wearable tech with a great feature - they allow you to write your own code. This live demo of programming with Jewelbots will introduce you to the Jewelbots API, showcase the latest awesome firmware updates(and how to get them), highlight fun projects, and talk through tips on running workshops, mentoring, teaching, & encouraging young women in tech. Loops are easy to understand when accompanied by color coordinated led lights!
Intermittent internet connection is something many people in the United States face, and it’s a huge hurdle to complete simple tasks like finding a bank balance – or even more important tasks like searching for employment.
Service workers can help by caching assets like HTML pages, images and even JavaScript files within the user’s browser. Once the assets are cached, the browser will load directly from the cache making the entire loading process faster. Even better, because the assets are already in the browser, the page will load without an Internet connection!
This talk will introduce service workers, explore use cases, and teach the audience how to implement service workers in their apps. We’ll also learn about other great features of service workers like background sync and push notifications.
This talk is about three things that interrelate. Firstly, its about some fundamental concepts for making a video game, such as how to manage animations, maps, basic AI and more. Secondly it is about Phaser 3, the latest-and-greatest framework for achieving your videogame goals in Javascript. Thirdly it is about my experience working on a boilerplate and scaffold to bring all these ideas into an Open Source project so anyone can make their own game in Javascript!
That just the groundwork! The last part of the talk is the best part! With these three things we're then going to mix it up and explore some of the more interesting techniques for game creation such as procedural level generation, AI randomness, Behavior Trees, rules engines for Tilemaps and more!
Every application, no matter what framework that you use needs a really solid centralized store. This helps to maintain state and persist data back into your systems. We will cover a check list to help determine what the best centralized store is for you. It may be using a library that is already out there or rolling your own solution. This talk will give you the knowledge needed to make those decisions!
Ten to fifteen years ago, we picked between a few major SQL databases. Now our apps have a variety of needs, and an overwhelming selection of database platforms. There are 5 main database families. In this talk we’ll survey all 5: Relational (SQL), Key/Value (NoSQL), Columnar (NoSQL), Document (NoSQL), and Graph (NoSQL). We’ll cover what scenarios each family handles well. In addition, we’ll discuss the most popular members of each family. So, the next time you need to pick a database, you’ll know which one - or ones - are the best fit.
Advances in CSS layout systems have made it easier than ever to create robust, browser-compatible, responsive layouts with Flexbox and CSS Grid. I’ll take you through the basics of both of these layout types, distill common misconceptions and demo some practical use cases so you can start using them today to create stronger layouts for the web.
The modern web is built on a foundation of components. All of our frameworks have their own idea of what a component is supposed to be. But as our tooling continues to evolve, we find ourselves unable to share code between applications even if they might use the same framework. Enter web components. This talk will explore the web components specifications and give you the tools and knowledge to begin creating the future of the web today.
My wife and I wanted to build a mobile app to make growing food easier, so we started learning how to code last year. We released our app at the end of the year and are now the #1 search result for "growing food" in the App Store with over 50,000 downloads and 10,000 monthly active users. This talk explains how we learned to code, built the app, and share the marketing strategies we used to climb to the top of the app store!
We record and livestream all conference videos. Here are some examples from our YouTube channel:
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Volunteers needed! Let us know how you want to volunteer for ThunderPlains. Social media posters, photographers, early-morning greeters and others all welcome to apply.