Presentation: Observable JS Apps

I've always been a little bit of an ops groupie. Strangely enough I think a lot of front-end developers to advance in their careers move to back - end roles. But I always have found that I was more excited about the infrastructure side of things, understanding networks and systems architectures, and that has been super helpful in trying to understand front-end code in production. The tools that I have applied to that problem tend to come more from what I've learned from ops folks, and the ways that they are thinking about understanding their systems. And that's definitely what this talk is about, thinking about how to take these event driven tools and use them on the front end. The high cardinality problems that are occasionally blockers on the back-end are happening every day and all the time in browsers — it's always that long tail bug it only happens in this one browser or to this one customer.

Probably the most interesting thing that I'll be sharing is about how to think about instrumenting single page apps. The community has understood instrumenting page loads really well for a long time. This talk is about starting to pull apart all the things your SPA can do and figuring out how to map your events to the common paradigms in SPA. It may be the most boring but most actionable thing I'll get into. There are analogs to thinking about how data flows through back-end systems.

I'm primarily talking about instrumenting frontend browser code. There's some interesting work that we're looking at around instrumenting server-side rendering too, so that people can decide whether they should have a particular piece of logic running on the server or the client side. Being able to instrument those is important, but the focus of talk is primarily stuff that runs on the client.