Just like regular expressions and recursion, if you mention terms like monad or category theory to developers, many of them may squirm in their seats. These are techniques and concepts that more often confuse and intimidate than clarify and inspire. But this shouldn’t be so!

In this workshop, we’ll build up from common and comfortable programming techniques we all know, to solid Functional Programming (FP) principles, and then to uncovering monads and other “friends” in category theory. We’ll see why monads are extremely important for our JS programs and what we’ve been missing all along!

Objectives

1. Explore the foundational principles of FP, including minimizing side effects (pure functions), using closure to manage state, recursion, etc

2. Apply FP foundations to coding patterns, including list operations, lazy/stream processing, etc

3. Leverage FP principles with monads (and other aspects of category theory) to tackle common programming challenges, and improve coding structure

Attendees

Mid-to-senior level software developers (JS)

Pre-requisites

36+ months of experience in JS. Attendees code along with presenter, so must have a comfortable basic dev environment (editor, browser, git).

With JavaScript celebrating its 30th birthday this year, now feels like a good time to look back at where we came from, and look forward to where we might be heading.

In this nostalgic talk, Phil will reflect on some of the moments of our past as JavaScript and web technologies evolved, share thoughts on some of our collective hits and misses, and present some hopes and insights on what the future could hold.

Yes, okay, ES2015 rules, and ES2017–2024 brought about a lot of cool things (most notably async/await, async iteration, optional chaining, private members), but a ton of cool stuff is expected to land in the next few years, too… and we can play with it already!

Christophe takes you through a whirlwind tour of the upcoming features he’s most excited about, due to become official in 2025, 2026… or 2027 ;-)

In this talk, we’ll explore how to build multimodal AI agents that understand voice, interpret images, hold short-term memory, and respond intelligently - all running entirely in the browser. No server, no cloud APIs, and no installation. Using modern tools like WebGPU and WebAssembly, we’ll see how far the open web has come in enabling real-time, privacy-preserving AI experiences.

Video games!! Now that I got your attention, let's write an emulator in JavaScript so we can play other people's games right in the browser. You know what they say, everything that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.

In this talk we will walk over the basics of building an emulator and then dive into how you can go about making an emulator for CHIP-8 while touching concepts like bitwise operators and hexadecimal notation.

Even with the European Accessibility Act in place, accessibility should not be seen solely as a matter of compliance or legislation, but as a commitment to humanity and building tools for people. The need for a government directive to force accessible design highlights a deeper problem—one worse than simply lacking a well-crafted application. The aim should be to foster empathy, spark genuine interest, and inspire developers to integrate accessibility into their development cycle because they care, not because regulations demand it.

Much like the promise of cake in Portal, login forms are everywhere in web development. While they may seem functional at first glance, many users with disabilities encounter a maze of invisible walls, from keyboard traps to inaccessible CAPTCHAs. It's as if GLaDOS designed these forms herself to test us!

In this practical walkthrough, we will debug the accessibility issues of a real React login component live, similar to traversing those test chambers: Using an actual screen reader, we'll show how small improvements, such as proper ARIA implementation and effective focus management, can transform a complex test chamber into a smooth user experience. Additionally, we will address the common pitfalls that GLaDOS might throw at us in both the Portal universe and the real world of accessibility. Last but not least, we'll discover authentication features which will support us in keeping authentication accessible for everyone.

So grab your portal gun—let's work together to break down these barriers and ensure that authentication truly works for everyone. The cake might be a lie, but accessibility doesn't have to be!

It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? And if you don’t, could it leave you in a worse place than where you started?

Drawing from my experience of the Typescript migration we completed at Monzo I’ll take you through some of the different outcomes of technical migrations and the things we learned along the way.

Sign up here: nordicjs.com/lightning-talk

This talk is about the soft side of software — the intuitive, often overlooked skills that help us build products people truly love. It’s about developing your taste, learning to recognize quality, and understanding why those things matter when writing code.

It’s also about un-learning certain habits we pick up as engineers — the urge to optimize, validate, and measure — to make space for empathy, vision, and a bit of magic.

I’ll share some of my experiences trying to build great products, and offer practical ways to train your eye for quality: how to spot the difference between good and great, and how to create things that don’t just work correctly, but feel right.

As we all are exploring ways to include AI in our products, too often we rely on a good old-fashioned conversational UI to bring AI to life. However, this experience is often painfully slow, the responses are generic and users have to meticulously explain to Gemini, Chat-GPT and others just what exactly they need — over and over and over again.

In this session, we’ll explore new design patterns for better AI experiences, with daemons, clustering, style lenses, structured presets and templates, dynamic editing, temperature knobs and everything in-between! We’ll learn how we can help users find answers and get work done better and faster — with better scoping, style lenses, clustering, recommendations, feedback loop and plenty of other interaction patterns.

The future of web development isn't about chasing the latest library or framework—it's about rediscovering the evolving power of the platform. This talk will challenge your assumptions, and show you how the most exciting advances for the web are happening right now in HTML and CSS. Learn how to build complex patterns like hover cards and customizable drop down menus with _zero JavaScript_. You'll unlock the potential of modern, functional CSS and built-in semantic components to make building performant, accessible UI's faster and easier. The future is bright, and it's simpler than you think.

Since the stabilization of ESM in Node.js in 2020, shipping packages that work with both the old CommonJS system and the new ESM system has been a challenge. Recently, Node.js introduced several features to help developers deal with the woes that come from the interoperability issues of the two module systems. In this talk we will look into them and the new patterns that can help making the lives of package maintainers easier.

Shipping packages that work with both CommonJS/ESM had been a major pain point for Node.js package maintainers and developers. We will look into some of the most requested and highlighted features shipped/backported in Node.js 20-24 that revolutionized this and the ongoing ecosystem migration patterns utilizing the new features.

Transitioning from an engineer to an engineering manager is a significant career shift that requires new skills and perspectives. Emma will explore the journey of moving into management, the challenges faced, and the key strategies for success.

You'll learn how to effectively lead teams, manage projects, and foster a collaborative environment while maintaining a strong technical foundation.

Whether you're considering this transition or looking to improve your management skills, this session will provide valuable insights and practical advice.

Node.js v23 introduces yet another configuration file: node.config.json. This long-awaited addition allows users to set runtime flags in a structured, predictable way—without relying on environment variables, CLI arguments, or external tools. But why did it take so many years for Node.js to adopt an official config file? In this talk, we'll explore the history of configuration in Node.js, the challenges that delayed standardization, and what node.config.json brings to the table. We'll also discuss its implications for developers, potential future improvements, and whether this really is the solution—or just another entry in the ever-growing list of config files.

This configuration file simplifies runtime flag management and addresses a long-standing gap in the Node.js ecosystem. As demand grows for standardized and efficient development practices, this topic is more critical than ever. Attendees will discover practical insights from its creator, learn how to use and extend this feature, and understand its broader impact on modern business operations.

Over 2 billion devices support some form of biometric unlock (Face ID, Touch ID, etc), making that by far the most common way people protect access to their devices.

The exact same capability, applied to authentication (login) for apps, is called Passkeys. But yet, despite the popularity of biometric device unlock, and the massive problems of passwords -- phishing, cracking, forgetting -- and even SMS texts or TOTP codes for 2FA, for some reason, Passkeys have not yet taken off.

It's well past time for Passkeys to have taken off. We desperately need a broad conversation about what's holding them back and what we can do to upgrade the web to using Passkeys.

In this talk, we'll explore the ins and outs of using Passkeys, including (most importantly!) how to make your users understand and love them!

Sign up here: nordicjs.com/lightning-talk

It’s 2025, your startup is growing, and you’re still using Javascript patterns from six (8? 12?) years ago. What do you do? You could do nothing—engineers are already leveraging modern best practices in new code and eventually, the legacy code will disappear on its own. You could shut down feature development—if the entire engineering organization is working together, maybe you could complete the code migration in just a few weeks. You could also leverage any number of AI tools that have cropped up to rewrite your code en masse—perhaps these tools could empower a single engineer to do the entire migration. These were the options we were weighing when faced with the task of converting hundreds of React class components to functional components at the end of last year. It was urgent enough to prioritize now, not quite urgent enough to stop other feature development, and too custom and potentially risky for an out-of-the-box AI tool. 

With two engineers, we converted nearly 70% of our components and dramatically simplified the remaining components with a more primitive tool—the humble codemod. This talk explores the role of codemods, AI, and manual intervention in code migrations in 2025.

Remember WordArt and Clippy? Stretched letter shapes with textures, shadows, gradients, and 3D effects allowed a limitless way to express creative freedom.

In this talk, I will not only satisfy your ’90s nostalgia, but I will also demonstrate how to revive WordArt masterpieces with the latest font technology.

Generating code is getting cheaper. Faster. Better. Which means, of course, that we’re drowning in errors, flawed assumptions, and bad ideas.

Models keep getting better, but regardless of how good they get, a team’s productivity will be capped by its ability to evaluate and synthesize what gets generated. In this talk, we’ll wander into the messy space between “generate” and “ship.” We’ll poke at the ways models gets things almost-right (and spectacularly wrong), why LLMs can’t evaluate end-to-end, and why the real challenge isn’t in making more—it’s in knowing what to keep.

Not much can surprise us when it comes to interface challenges. We can design a decent card, a well-rounded accordion and an exquisite hamburger navigation. But what if there are slightly more complex UX challenges ahead of us?

In this workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, you will learn how to tackle intricate design challenges in corporate, enterprise and B2B environments with ease.

Complex UIs don’t have to be complicated. In this in-person workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant for European Parliament and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems. Whether you’re working on enterprise-grade tables or complex multi-page forms, this workshop will give you the techniques and tools you need to excel at your work.

In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• Complex mega-dropdowns with 4+ levels of navigation, layout, interaction design, sideways navigation, breadcrumbs, top task analysis, mobile/desktop (e.g. large university websites),
• Complex modals and overlays, confirm vs. undo behavior, right timing, intraction design, with guidelines and best practices to improve click-through rates and decrease mistakes (e.g. enterprise software),
• Lengthy multi-page forms, focusing on form components, one-column vs. multi-column layout, error recovery, progress steps, inline validation, routing, conditional reveal, disabled buttons, input buffering (e.g. complex multi-column multi-page forms with dozens of steps),
• Enterprise-grade tables, complex use-cases with inline editing, filtering, tagging, sorting and search — on mobile and on desktop (insurance, loss prevention),
• Complex filtering, layout, auto-apply vs. manual apply, filtering overlays, filtering and sorting intervals, best practices and guidelines, on mobile and on desktop (public archives, media library, large catalogs of products),
• Advanced search and autocomplete UX, with layout and interaction design, when to show/hide suggestions, search query iteration, autocomplete blindness, faceted search, smart suggestions, type-ahead pattern, keyboard navigation, on mobile and on desktop (e.g. in enterprise software),
• Dashboards and spreadsheets, with complex layouts, data editing, inline filtering, infinite scroll UX, “load more” vs. pagination, access to footer and access to the current state, mobile optimizations,
• Data visualization, how to choose charts, how to design honest and effective charts, incl. formatting, color palettes, legends, formatting, tables and interactive filters,
• Design patterns for expert interfaces and B2B, with advanced features, visual indicators, customizable widgets, complex business logic, enterprise products, legacy systems, keyboard shortcuts, query constructors and 3rd-party integrations,
• Accessibility of complex interfaces, with UX considerations, colorblindness, designing for older adults, children, people with autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, WCAG 2.2 compliance and EU Accessibility Act,
• 100s of real-life examples, government and university websites, trip planners, financial services, eCommerce, online banking, configurators, insurance and mortgage calculators, data grids and enterprise products.
• Checklist for complex UIs with guidelines and decisions to consider when designing any component in a complex setting.