What to expect at FINJS New York 2020

FINJS New York will now take place on the rescheduled date of May 12th at the Edison Ballroom. Every year over a thousand FinTech professionals come to learn about innovative technologies and make new industry friends.

NearForm Chief Product Officer Conor O'Neill will be speaking about high-performance Node.js and Javascript - below he tells us a bit more about his talk and what to expect at the conference.

My name is Conor O’Neill and I’m Chief Product Officer in NearForm. I also co-head the NearForm Research team with James Snell, where I’m responsible for connecting the activities of the Research teams to NearForm’s overall innovation strategy.

I’m going to be talking about JavaScript/Node.js performance and some of the ways in which you can get major performance gains in your web applications without a lot of effort. It’s based on many of the things we have seen in our years of building applications and consulting with our customers on their existing apps.

FinJS brings together a fantastic group of people who are building interesting new products, tools and services in JavaScript on the desktop for the Financial Services Industry. We’re eager to become an active member of the Fintech open source community. We're working on some exciting Research projects in NearForm that we believe will have real benefits for the financial services market and are keen to hear people's views on the ground about where they see potential and how we can add value.

I attended the London FinJS event in 2019 and was really blown away. I was stunned that you could get hundreds of people into a room to hear about JavaScript on the desktop on a dark wet Tuesday night in the City of London. The talks were all top-notch and we learned a lot in a few short hours. You can quickly grab some highlights from that evening in this event round-up post. 

There is still a perception in many industries, including FinTech, that JavaScript is slow or that Node.js can’t scale. We want to show that it’s possible to build fullstack JavaScript applications, including desktop, mobile and wearable applications, that can meet all of your performance requirements. Some of the things that have been created in NearForm in this area include Clinic.js, Fastify, Pino, ESX JS and the Worker Threads implementation in Node.js.

We want to see better JavaScript in the wild. We want more and more developers to have the expertise to build high-performance easily-maintainable JS applications that are faster to create and deploy than anything else out there. I’d also like to give everyone a glimpse into some of the next-generation Node.js and JavaScript projects we are working on in NearForm Research which will result in major performance gains for developers.

As someone who has lived the various language wars all the way back to Usenet in the early 90s, I’ve always found the antipathy to JavaScript and its reputation as a toy language, amusing. JavaScript and Node.js stopped being toys a very long time ago and are now the first port of call for anyone building a modern web application. Whilst the core language has gained most of the “missing” features its detractors complained about, its true power resides in the ecosystem and the community. So in some ways, I’d like to applaud that notable lack of change and celebrate how diverse communities can drive projects like JavaScript and Node.js forward.  

The Financial Services industry’s move to building desktop web applications with JavaScript is incredibly exciting for us. I’d encourage anyone attending to come talk to us if the business impact of application performance is something they’d like to hear more about.

The NearForm blog is choc-full of useful posts on application development and performance. You’ll find posts from the top Node.js and JavaScript developers in the world, including core members of several global OSS projects. For people particularly interested in Node.js performance, they should keep an eye on the clinicjs.org blog which will have a lot more content coming in the next few months.