"Make the Back-End Team Jealous: Elm in Production" by Richard Feldman

Richard Feldman shares his experience introducing Elm into a production React and jQuery codebase, highlighting its reliability and performance benefits.

How often do you find a back-end team jealous of the language the front-end team gets to use? Having modernized many legacy front-ends over the years, I can unequivocally say that introducing the Elm programming language to a rich web app (previously built on a mix of React.js and legacy jQuery) has yielded the most reliable, clean, and performant result I've ever seen. Elm's benefits to this mission-critical code have felt like the programming equivalent of the "After" photo in an infomercial. In this talk attendees will learn how to cleanly introduce Elm into an existing JS front-end from start to finish. Highlights include Elm's Time-Traveling Debugger, its uncanny ability to catch nearly all runtime exceptions at build time (no more "undefined is not a function"), and a package manager that guarantees and automatically enforces semantic versioning for every package. Attendees are assumed to be comfortable with JavaScript and CSS, but no other knowledge is needed. Come see how nice your front-end programming experience can become! Richard Feldman NOREDINK @rtfeldman Richard is a functional programmer who specializes in pushing the limits of browser-based UIs. He's built a framework that performantly renders hundreds of thousands of shapes in HTML5 Canvas, a JavaScript immutables library that seamlessly interoperates with normal JS collections, and a Web App for long-form writing that functions like a desktop app in the absence of an Internet connection.