Blog - HubSpot Product Team

Quick Recap: The First-Ever Tech Talk at Night

Written by Hannah Fleishman (she/her) | Jun 10, 2015


Last night, we hosted the first Tech Talk at Night here at HubSpot HQ.  Over 100 product and engineering gurus came out to hear from our very own Ben Anderson on React.js and Wayfair's Andrew Rota and Matt DeGennaro on Tungsten.js. Two hours, three dynamic speakers, and dozens of carefully-crafted Pimm's cups later, we all had learned a few new names and front-end tips.  

Every week, we have internal Tech Talks on interesting problems our team is solving. There's always a completely new perspective and topic on the table, from chrome extensions to microcopy. We wanted to take this beyond our team and create a platform for Boston's engineering community to share the problems they're working on and hear what other companies are working on.  Cue Tech Talk at Night. 

For this inaugural event, we focused on front-end frameworks. Andrew and Matt from Wayfair walked us through how and why they built Tungsten.js to turn on efficient DOM updates, and fast client and server-side template rendering. Wayfair is a highly scaled multi-page site that supports a broad range of browsers. They have recently open sourced their framework, and the slides from the talk are here.

The second talk of the evening was given by Ben, on our Platform-as-a-Service team, who presented on thinking like React and why "going with the grain" is beneficial. Having spent time in the trenches building React apps, Ben had 3 tips -- prefer functional idioms over OO, prefer stateless over stateful components, and chose clarity over brevity. His slides are available on "React - Going with the Grain".

Behind the scenes, HubSpotters were whipping up summer cocktails (thanks to our MC Anthony's artistry) and serving up "yummy and healthy noms" (thanks, Lisa!) In true inbound marketing fashion, here's a recap of the evening as told by social media. 
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