Workshop Details

Kyle Simpson has a way of taking complex JavaScript topics and breaking them into their essential components so that you can understand them in a very deep way. He'll start by giving you a primer in basics of functional programming, including closure, pure functions, etc. and move to how we can use these concepts to write better programs. Then we'll look at why callbacks fall short of what we need for managing async flow control in our complex modern applications. We'll identify the two major problems that make up "callback hell" (no, nothing to do with nesting/indentation!). Then, to clean up this mess, we'll look at two different ES6 mechanisms which each solve a different aspect of callback hell: generators and promises. We'll see that generators are about solving sync-looking async, while promises are about restoring trust to our continuations. And then we'll see how to compose promises with generators for solid async. After gaining a firm grasp over these reinvented async methodologies, then we'll look some at higher-order async patterns, and learn ways of identifying when and where to apply them: Event-based async, Reactive Sequences (aka Observables), CSP (channel-based concurrency), etc. To wrangle all these different async abstractions, we'll practice the exercises with the "asynquence" library.

Daily Schedule