 to share their knowledge with the world. In fact, this is theCUBE, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of the Fluent Conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm joined by co-host Jeff Frick today from SiliconANGLE. And we're excited to bring you wall-to-wall coverage, two days of live broadcast. We're going to broadcast the keynotes in the morning and then do our normal CUBE commentary. Where we sit down kind of anchored lifestyle and talk to the tech athletes and one of our tech athletes, as we say here, is Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Press. Also one of the co-chairs with Simon St. Laurent. He's a chair, he's from England and brings a different perspective. Obviously having the chair and also putting the program together and kind of hurting all the cats to get the keynotes done. All the logistics of these events, it's a lot of work. Peter, welcome to theCUBE. Oh yeah, it's great to be here. You know, it's a lot of work to go with these events and you guys pull off a great conference. But the market's evolving. The challenge always is to be relevant and deliver a great program to the developers. That's where there's relevance. You're providing great value, good collaboration, good networking, and ultimately the right trend signals and the right slipstreams and you can give those guys data on so they can be better developers and build great stuff. So with that, what are some of the things this year that's happening in the conference program? And then we can talk about some of the tech trends. Boil down the conference here. What's new about it? What's the same? What were some of the keynotes kicked off here on D1? I think the thing that we've really seen is that we've gone from trying to make this a JavaScript conference, precisely to being more about the web platform as a whole because JavaScript on its own, it is very relevant to engineers, but in terms of the overall picture, it's really about the web platform and all the things that tie together with JavaScript. HTML5, WebGL, all these other technologies are just as important as JavaScript. So that's actually what we've been trying to do with the program this year. We've been trying to make it a bit more deep and actually cover some of those things. Have talks about gaming and things that you wouldn't naturally assume to do with JavaScript. So we saw that with Brendan this morning. He did that. He did an Unreal Engine 3 demo. So it's like literally almost like the game Quake or the type of thing where you're running around with Rocket Launcher and all that type of stuff. And he had that in his keynote. And if you think JavaScript conference, even two, three years ago, you wouldn't think Rocket Launcher's. It's a totally different thing. So we are seeing more gaming coming in, but it is about that web platform. It's not just about JavaScript at the time. So that was a great demo in the keynote. Everybody had a huge war of applause. So exactly, for the people that weren't there, what was so special about that, that he was able to do and what he was actually demonstrating, not just running around shooting up zombies with the demo? Yeah, I mean, of course, just looking at it from a gamer point of view, you think, what's so special about that? My PC's done that type of thing for years. What he was showing off in particular is some work that Firefox and some people at Mozilla have done on something called asm.js, I guess you could call it asm.js, which is this idea of producing a more optimized compiler for a limited subset of JavaScript that can be very easily optimized down to machine code in real-time, essentially, and run, you know, just like many, many times faster than normal JavaScript, JavaScript just had a reputation of being a very slow language, but because of all the interest around it, like Google and just different teams have put so much money into making it fast, this is like the next step of that. And part of the goal of asm.js is to take languages like C++ and C and then compile them down to this asm.js, bring that into browsers that support asm.js and make it fast. So that's currently just Firefox, I believe, the nightlies at the moment, and then you can do the sort of things that Brendan did on stage. You can run that stuff, and it's fast. Whereas if you ran that three or four years ago, he would have like, he could have scrolled the mouse and then the next frame would be drawing line by line. So, you know, it's a real step forward and it's great to see these types of things in our keynotes here. Yeah, the other thing he talked about was really the expansion of JavaScript going into all kinds of devices and talked about it in TVs. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that proliferation of this platform is enabling more opportunities for the development guys and getting off of what were kind of classical computing devices in the past. Yeah, so as you say, there was a certain thing that JavaScript was used for in the old days. If you go back like 10 years, you may have seen it used to make sure that you've filled in all the information on a form on a web page, and that's like really advanced stuff. Whereas now, we're seeing games, we're seeing it on, as you say, TVs. So in the various newsletters I run, I run job listings and I've even recently had one, I think it was like Netflix or someone like that and they wanted just someone to come in, be a JavaScript developer for TV interfaces. That's it, that's the cool job. And you wouldn't have seen this like two years ago. This is a new thing. So it's getting everywhere, even on the iPads and things that we're running. It's becoming a major way of making apps run, even so-called native apps are including a lot of JavaScript and things now because developers are used to working with the web and like taking that environment to other places that you wouldn't necessarily imagine it being. Peter, the explosion of web 2.0, the hype of web 2.0 going back to the 2004 timeframe, 2005, 2006 ballpark, it really created that web developer explosion of land stack. And then we saw the onslaught beyond that, JavaScript, all just a tsunami of great stuff, right? So then, whether that people will argue whether that came home or not, putting a fresh coat of paint on a website wasn't really what it was about. You guys really brought it to a level where JavaScript is not about that, it's about a different mindset, it's about front end that's got great user experience across multiple platforms, web and mobile. We were talking about that on our intro today. Agile's been great on the web, but now Agile means something different from mobile. And then the advent of Node.js, for example, has highlighted the headroom that developers now have with mobile. So with all that kind of confluence coming together, what is the main tech trend right now that you're seeing that brings all this together? Because developers have to be amazing on the front end, great user experiences, and there's some serious coding involved, but yet now have to be real-time, there's some big data peeking into this, you've got analytics, all kinds of new techniques and methods. How has that translated into new code, new approaches? Can you comment and put some commentary around that? I think the interesting thing you focused on in your question is about engineers and code. So O'Reilly used to have an event that was a Web 2 summit, it was a really big event. They no longer run that, but that was more of a business-oriented thing. You'd get a lot of technologists going, but they wouldn't necessarily all be engineers. So that seems to be something that's happened in the recent years, 10 years back, the guy writing, or the lady possibly, writing JavaScript wouldn't have been the star of the show, whereas now a show like Fluent, that's now happened. So we have a slightly different audience to some of those older shows. Why is that? Is it just the demand for apps? Is it just, what's the main thing about it? It just seems that the concentration of power now rests with developers, because there's so many different things that you can use all of this code for. We've mentioned the TVs and things like that. It's not just, you can't just get any old JavaScript coder along to develop whatever it is you want, because there's so many different niches, and you mentioned Node.js, for example. You need some skills to be working with this type of stuff. So the role of a developer has become more important, even, this may be controversial for some of the audience, but has become more important than the VCs, the people necessarily even running the companies and the idea of people actually doing the implementation now requires an extreme level of skill. It's not just throw a few bodies at it and have a nice coat of paint on, say, a website. There is some coding involved, and you need some serious chops on the CSN or just raw coding. And performance side as well. I mean, we had a workshop yesterday with Ilja Grigorek of Google, and he did like three hours just on putting performance in the middle of your JavaScript app. And that has become important now, because for all the advances, I mean, we spoke about JavaScript becoming a lot faster, you know, you still go to web pages and you scroll down the page and it's like lagging at like three or four frames a second, and it's like, it shouldn't be that way. And so it really still takes a real focus on performance to get it to work. And you know, we've been covering the Node, we did the Node Summit, it was in San Francisco two years ago, and I don't think they've had one since, but that really exploded and took DevOps into the developer market. With DevOps has been a phenomenon, we joined, we saw Engine Yard, and a variety of other pre-cloud companies out there doing some great work around DevOps. And DevOps, you know, has been a cloud thing, and there's been some infrastructure involved, some great automation, abstraction away from the network stuff. But DevOps now really is fundamental, part of the coding. And like you mentioned, JavaScript is much more in the center stage of all the conversations around user experience, et cetera. So I want to ask you, what do you think the big challenges and then opportunities are for developers? Certainly on the starting a new venture, it's really easy to start a venture as it's been documented in the web many times in blogs and our blog. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for these developers that they have now in this current market? The biggest challenge, and I think it's one that we're really trying to address with Fluent, and probably even more so next year, because of the direction things are going, is that developers can't just say, I am a JavaScript developer. They can't just have that, just one language under their hat. They have to think about the web platform, and that's what we've noticed when we're organizing the program for this. We can't just fill the program up just with JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. We need JavaScript, WebGL, all these different things that you may associate like WebGL, which is the whole 3D canvas thing with gaming, but it's not just for gaming. There's people using it for medical imaging, for example. You have the human body and rotate and doctors are using it and stuff like that. So there's so many technologies you need to have a grasp on, and luckily we have lots of people here who are really good at that sort of stuff. You're seeing a lot more people being very eclectic than what they choose to work with. It's not just, I'm a JavaScript developer. It's I'm a JavaScript and performance and WebGL and I work on Canvas and things like that. They need to have that full package. So I think you're going to see more people saying that they are, say, web platform developers or experts on the web platform, not just I'm a JavaScript developer. What do you think about the startup community? Obviously you guys have the open mic night night, we call it open mic where the entrepreneurs can get up there. What are some of the startups you're seeing here? Because obviously a lot of startups in this crowd, a lot of developers, what are some of the hot areas you're seeing startups kick the tires on and build out on right now around Fluent? Well, one of the main things we see is especially tooling. So we have sponsors here that work on IDEs and tools that actually make your life as a developer better and I think Nyo does that as well. So we've got that side of it, which is kind of almost like the infrastructure side. That's like the software infrastructure and then you have the hardware infrastructure which are people like Rackspace and so on who have been around a long time and continue to be relevant to these types of developers. But then I think what we're seeing is almost like a normalization of this stuff. So some of the startups that we've got in the startup showcase for example, last year there may have been somewhat more JavaScript focused, whereas this year it's more like just general things. So like a delivery service and things like that. And you think, well what's that got to do with JavaScript? But they're using all this JavaScript and web platform stuff behind the scenes to make their offering more kind of seductive, more useful and more slick in terms of- So kind of platform related things in a way, right? Yeah, it really is the platform has become normalized. It's not just like this is a website anymore. The web is a platform and it's kind of almost like the default platform now. People don't just say, why haven't you got a native app? If your website is really good because they can use it on their iPad on their computer and whatever it's they want to do. So Peter, you put out all this great weekly, I mean you got you right on the pulse of this stuff. What's the next big hill to take? What's the next big challenge? And I know it's everything's kind of moved to this iterative process. We're going little by little, but what's the next big challenge that the community is going to try to go after? I think we're seeing some stuff happening with, there's always been this argument between like native apps and the web. And we're seeing that a little bit more especially with the advances in responsive design, for example, there are like actual newspapers that had dedicated apps. I think the Financial Times is an example of this where a company had an app and then they're like, well, hang on, we can just do all of this for our existing processes on the web and just make it responsive. So we're seeing things like that happen. And I think that battle is going to carry on. We're going to see some kind of conclusion to it. Which is pretty interesting with this whole proliferation of apps. What you're saying is that that potentially is a temporary, was a temporary solution as the web as a platform enables people to really build it natively into the, I don't know, browsers, the right word, but whatever the, I guess it would be the browser-based interface with the information. We may well see more of a marriage of that. So even if things will look like apps, they may be web technologies in the background. And again, Mozilla is actually a good example of that. They've got their phones coming out based on Firefox OS and Firefox OS is HTML5 based. So if you load an app on a Firefox OS phone, you're running an HTML5 app. So they've kind of married those two ideas together. So it's not like web's going to win or native's going to win. It's kind of like web is one, but through the back door. It still looks like an app. People think it's an app, but it's the web. And at the end of the day, I really don't care. I just want the experience of it. Whatever the plumbing is, it delivers it to me. I really don't care. So we're going to go to Twitter for some questions. So Eric Rancho asks, hey, Fluent Conference. Hey, that's you, that's you. Eric, I'm asking you a question now. I was just tweeted to you. Hey, Simon, Fluent Conference, hashtag. Anyone care to argue that responsive web design and agile design development can play well together, ain't buying it, hashtag. So basically saying is that, okay, responsive web design and agile design can play well together. He's saying he's not buying that. What's some of the conversations around that that you're hearing? I'm not, like in terms of my day-to-day work, I'm not directly involved in responsive web design, but I do actually produce a newsletter for a pen to who are a sponsor here. They are very, very strongly into responsive design. Well, describe for the folks out there, what is the difference between the two? Well, there's two different things really. I mean, responsive web design is this whole concept of producing, because if you've got a website and it's just like one fixed size and you resize your browser and there's scroll bars and you load it on your phone and it's just all shrink down. Yeah, that's just like a normal static website, essentially. Yeah, we need work there. Anyone watching, please call me. There are technologies now that you can use, like CSS media queries that you can ask the device, essentially, if you are of a certain size. The Suckey website is static. And so responsive is what? Having the ability to respond to different... Yeah, you say it will look this way on this type of device, it should look this way on this type of device and then kind of in between it kind of tries to figure out the best way of going about it. And then, agile development, it's kind of really like the business process you use with your stakeholders and so on. So I've seen them as kind of being incompatible things as such but not in the sense that you couldn't do it without doing it. Well, I have a comment, I have an opinion on this so I'm glad he brought that up. Now you kind of help me kind of tie that together is that I personally believe, this is again my personal opinion in my many years, maybe I'm old school, but I think that responsive is definitely the way to go. Agile is a methodology for pushing code. Great for web development. Push code all day long. You know, hey, things break. You know, as Mark Zuckerberg says, break things and push it. But mobile, it's very, very difficult to push agile. I'll tell you why. People don't upgrade as much on mobile. So mobile's much more involved in terms of having a QA process. Where agile, that is the QA in my opinion. So we're seeing that tease out now. So with that, mobile's a really big part of it. And some will say mobile experience should be much different than the web. So web's agile, no problem. Responsiveness, I think they do play well together. In mobile, I think it's a little bit different because agile processes doesn't really fit well onto mobile. I mean, iterating is cool but like pushing code all the time will cause a bad user. What's your take on that? It's my opinion, but I mean, what do you think about that? I mean, mobile, can they support that agile methodology? I don't work with it. So this is a very easy answer for me to give. Ejection. Are we like, yeah, it totally works. But no, I know there are many tools around nowadays that will allow you to do mobile testing very, very quickly and easily. It will show you something on multiple devices all at the same time, that type of thing. But I see what your point in that there is a lag compared to the desktop. Developers can't just run 10 mobile platforms on their desktop in the way that they can run 10 different browsers and just go test, test, test. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I saw a couple of mobile apps, I won't say their names, but really had a lot of promise. Good development teams just really kind of go dead on arrival like a lead balloon because they were trying to apply agile. So that first launch of the app where you get that stickiness, you get that momentum, it kind of falls short. You got to import address books. So just for developers, just, you know, what I've seen, again, my observation, you can't just put agile over this. So again, I'm done ranting. We'll see how it plays out. I mean, agile is great on the web, but this responsiveness thing has been a real conversation yesterday in the hallways here. And so, any programs around that here in the conference that you guys want to highlight? There's not actually a massive amount of content to do, specifically to do with responsive web design. I mean, we have people here, you know, sponsors who are very much into it and people can talk to about it, but no, I don't mean anything significant and very just responsive web design all the way. That could be wrong. My memory is never very good. Well, I mean, we'll see how the demand is. If it's hot, I mean, it becomes, it gets some momentum and it's just all about what the users want. This is something that, you know, behind the scenes we have discussed in that we do have design-related things in the program, but because of, you know, the space that we've got, I think we've got like about 60 talk slots. Yeah, there's always JavaScript things that we do want to cover and other web platform things that sometimes the design takes a little bit of a back seat. So we only have a handful of design talks. We want to extend that for next year if there's the interest of course. So on a personal question, I got to ask you, we're going to have Simon on tomorrow to close out the program. The other coach is Simon St. Laurent. What should we ask him? And don't tell him what you're going to tell us. Give us the good zinger form. Come on, you don't think he's watching the queue right now? No, he's too busy running around doing logistics and he's a great guest. But you know, I want to, just, because you got the inside baseball on what's going on at the conference, what's a good topic to discuss with Simon? I have no idea. Come on, give us a personal jerk then. Simon has been so nice throughout the whole process to everyone that I haven't been like constantly scheming back in my head, how can I get it? Whereas, you know, some people might want to do that. Okay, we're going to ask him some good questions. What's next for you guys? As you guys go through the courses program, just walk us through your mindset right now. Obviously the keynote's just kicked off here on day one. What's going to, how do you envision the rest of the show playing out and what's next for fluent? Well, one of the good things for me is that, you know, we've done a reasonably good job of getting the program together that I could almost just go and get on a plane now and the show would still run fine. You know, it would work. So actually, most of my work over the next couple of days is thinking about how does this relate to next year? You know, because it's going to be bigger, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be some changes and the focus is going to be slightly different. And how does what we're seeing and the feedback we're getting, you know, including people that might miss us into your show as well, how does that play into what we do next year? So, you know, if there's anyone watching that is here and has ideas for, you know, you should do this next year. You should change this, get rid of this. We want to hear that type of stuff. And the main thing that I can give away really is that it's going to be more web platform focused. We're not just going to keep saying JavaScript, JavaScript. It's become that bigger picture. Yeah, and the demand on the enterprise side is also kicked in huge. We've seen a lot of BYOD, a lot of analytics, a lot of big data, again, a lot of service, a lot of security. Again, complex stuff, not just consumer. So, Peter, we're sitting here in the valley and John and I both live in Palo Alto, so we're kind of valley centric. I wonder if you could give a perspective from the other side of the pond, kind of, you know, from the UK side and the European side and this whole movement and the vibe there relative to when you come over here? I think the interesting thing, especially about the UK, is that there have long been lots of really good, like, web design conferences that just focus on the design. So we take a bit more of a technical angle than that, but there have been some great design, you know, events and there's tons of great designers there. I think if we ever do, like a fluent EU, I think we would help to bring some of that more technical aspect in. So I think we do actually have a reasonable amount of people that attend the conference from Europe, partly because there just isn't that, I mean, that I'm aware of, that overarching event in the way that we're doing it here. So it would be great to take it over there at some point, but people are coming here to see it. You know, there's people from France here, Germany, you know, we even have speakers from overseas, you know, we have a speaker from Argentina, so people are coming to here and I think that's partly just because of the cachet that San Francisco has. You know, you're kind of in the part of this whole industry, so people have to come here. Whereas if we were doing this, you know, in, like, Iowa or somewhere, we might struggle a bit more. And you might not be here either, so, you know. This is a good place to do it. The queue goes everywhere. We go wherever the event is we go. Okay, so give us a plug, final question for you, just on the next couple of events, I mean, do you have any more outside the US? I mean, what's the plan for Fluent just next year? What's the game plan for the Fluent conference? Well, we have put together the contract and everything for next year is where it's going to be and all that type of stuff. I can't reveal any of that, so there's going to be a reveal at the end of the keynotes tomorrow. So I guess I'm giving away. I'm announcing an announcement, essentially. So that's all going to happen tomorrow. But really, you know, I guess people are going to be bored of this by now, which is probably good that it will end soon, because I keep saying, we're platform, we're platform, we're platform. That is the focus for next year, so where you see JavaScript today, it's probably going to say we're platform tomorrow. Well, Peter, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I knew you were super busy again. JavaScript is evolving. It's real software engineering, a lot of coding, server side to the edge for mobile and web, it's exploding. It's tons of technology coming out, new tools, platforms, tooling, et cetera. We're here at the Fluent conference live. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of Riley Media's Fluent conference. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We extract the signal from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.