What is Node? How many Angles does Angular really have? How fast is React's reaction time?

Boston's nothing if not a college town, and we're celebrating the start of the school year (and the accompanying turnover of 90% of the rental market) by partnering with great speakers from other local meetups to present a series of introductory talks on Node, Angular, Git and other topics of broad interest to the JS community.

Come one, come all for a beginner-friendly night; and even if you're an expert, come ready to learn!

So without further ado, THE TALKS: more details to come!

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Jeff Winkler, React

ReactJS Core concepts

What makes React different? How can you get started? Jeff will introduce React.js and share how you can use it to rapidly build a maintainable, component-based interface, without developer fatigue.

Jeff is a full-stack developer, Sr. Architect at Sycamore Informatics. Jeff has been using React for over two years, previously Ember and Angular. Jeff runs the site http://react.rocks, a Pinterest-style directory of ReactJS examples.

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Jeff Whelpley, Angular Universal Tooling

With great power comes great…complexity?

You can do so many new and amazing things with the latest innovations in the world of JavaScript. Powerful new libraries like TypeScript and Angular 2 come at a price, however, since the tool chain required to get it all working for your web app can be daunting. The mental hurdles to overcome can be even worse when you add something like server rendering or native mobile to the mix.

In this talk Jeff will give a high level intro to Angular 2 and talk about how you can use one of its most amazing new features, the CLI, to easily build and deploy an app. 

Jeff is the CTO of GetHuman. He is also a Google Developer Expert (GDE), host of the weekly AngularAir podcast, co-organizer of the Boston Angular meetup and maintainer of the Angular Universal library (Angular 2 server rendering).

The Boston Angular Meetup regularly pulls in amazing speakers both from Boston and around the world. The co-organizers, Jeff and Sharon, are both GDEs that work with the Angularcore team on a regular basis. This relationship contributes to the steady stream of amazing speakers and the support for things like hackathons, training sessions run by core team members, and more. 

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Brian Sodano, Build an API in minutes with Hapi.js and Node

Many of you may have used Express to build Web APIs. Did you know there's a great and easy-to-learn alternative? Let's explore building a server from scratch and see how quick and painless it is to create a robust, fully-functional web server in minutes -- with all the bells and whistles. Swagger. Authentication. Authorization. Modules. Debugging and logging. We'll even go through consumption of event-driven data sources.

Brian runs the Boston Node.js meetup, and is a long-time supporter and facilitator in the Boston software development community. Formerly working on the Internet of Things at both Xively as well as iRobot, he is currently building an amazing automation and security platform at Cybric (http://cybric.io). Brion likes to focus on APIs, messaging, data modeling, automation, and pizza.

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Mike Pennisi, Git

Between git checkout -b branchname and git push origin master, git's command-line interface can be a little intimidating. Some folks prefer GUIs like GitHub for Mac but even the fanciest graphics can't hide the tool's complexity. Lets take a step back and talk about the fundamental concepts that define git. The discussion won't make you a master of the tool, but it will prepare you to dive into the specifics in all their technical detail.

Mike is a contributor to a number of open source projects, including JSHint, test262, Socket.io, and Backbone.LayoutManager. Mike is an engineer at Bocoup, where Mike's primary interests are user interface design, privacy and peer to peer networking on the Open Web.