Agile development often focuses on immediate concerns: what am I doing now, or, at most, in this sprint? Even in situations where developement is Agile, architecture is often… not.

Ahead of the Pack is an approach to architecture running only one or two steps ahead of development, with the same level of focus: what feature am I describing for the developers right now? Ahead of the Pack means descibing objects—or database tables, or other discrete entities—in terms of their relationship with what has already been developed, so that updates to the architecture do not fundamentally modify what has already been built—or what has already passed quality assurance.

We draw examples from real applications, and provide a glimpse of future directions.

To the uninitiated, paradigms can seem daunting, difficult to understand, and even harder to apply. This talk attempts to clear up that confusion and misconception along with giving some practical advice for how different paradigms can be applied in JavaScript.

Beginning with an overview of three common programming paradigms in JavaScript, Object Oriented, Functional, and Imperative (Procedural), this talk will illustrate the differences between all three approaches. After highlighting the possible advantages and disadvantages of each, the talk will conclude with some practical examples of ways to utilize these paradigms in your own code.

With the rise in popularity recently, functional programming has become "The Next Big Thing". As of today, there are tons of frameworks and tools that can be used to for front-end, back-end, desktop, and mobile development. With that being said, the majority of us are still using object-oriented languages for our day jobs and don't need to learn functional programming, right?

In this talk, I'll walk you through my experiences learning functional programming over the last year, how my style of programming has changed, and now how I think about programming with regards to both functional and object-oriented paradigms.

F# is a rich, expressive, general purpose, functional-first language designed with the stated goal of allowing developers to write simple code to solve complex problems. While The Book of F# provides a comprehensive tour of the language this session will focus on several of the primary ways F# accomplishes that goal. In just 60 minutes we'll discuss what it means to be functional-first, the advantages of the functional-first paradigm, and several key language features including curried functions, partial function application, record types, discriminated unions, pattern matching, units of measure, type providers, and computation expressions.