Track Overview
WebAssembly Throughout the Stack
JavaScript has been the official “language of the web” for the last 25 years, however, just over a year ago, that all changed when WebAssembly became a W3C standard. Now fully supported by all the major browsers, WebAssembly gives the opportunity to write web applications using a wide range of languages via its sand-boxed and performance-optimized runtime. WebAssembly now sits alongside HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and is the fourth language of the web. This is surely a reason to take note!
However, WebAssembly, despite having ‘web’ in its name, is proving to be much more than just a browser technology or JavaScript rival. The properties of this runtime (multi-language, lightweight, sandboxed, secure, cross-platform, etc) have piqued the interest of the wider community. In the past few years, we’ve seen WebAssembly used as the runtime for serverless, running smart contracts on blockchain, IoT, and edge computing. Ironically WebAssembly may have more of an impact outside of the browser!
In this track, we’ll explore the full range of applications WebAssembly has to offer and consider where this technology will take us in the future.
From this track
WASI: A New Kind of System Interface
Tuesday May 18 / 10:00AM EDT
The system interfaces we use today were designed in the 70s and 80s to power the systems that were prevalent at that time. But increasingly what a "system" even is, is much more open-ended. They include distributed applications spanning the cloud and edge networks, tiny IoT devices...
Lin Clark
Senior Principal Engineer @Fastly
Experimenting with WASM for future audience experiences in BBC iPlayer
Tuesday May 18 / 11:00AM EDT
In BBC R&D we are exploring how we might deliver future audience experiences which are immersive, interactive and object-based to all our audiences regardless of what devices they might have at home. We want to build a platform which will allow audiences to interact with what they see on...
Tim Pearce
Software Engineer and WebAssembly Advocate R&D @BBC
Wasm in the Wild West: A Practical Application Tale
Tuesday May 18 / 12:00PM EDT
Almost one year ago, our team released Krustlet, a Kubernetes Kubelet implementation for running WebAssembly modules in the cloud. Since then, we’ve spent plenty of time out on the frontier, implementing full Kubernetes functionality for Wasm as well as other experiments like WAGI. Along...
Taylor Thomas
Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft
Matt Butcher
Principal Software Developer @Microsoft
Panel: WebAssembly - the Past, Present and Future
Tuesday May 18 / 01:00PM EDT
WebAssembly, despite having ‘web’ in its name, is proving to be much more than just a browser technology or JavaScript rival. The properties of this runtime (multi-language, lightweight, sandboxed, secure, cross-platform, etc) have piqued the interest of the wider community. In the...
Aaron Turner
Senior Software Engineer @Fastly
Taylor Thomas
Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft
Matt Butcher
Principal Software Developer @Microsoft
Speakers from this track
Lin Clark
Senior Principal Engineer @Fastly
Lin Clark is a Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly, focusing on WebAssembly. She is a co-founder of the Bytecode Alliance, which is building a vision of a future WebAssembly ecosystem that extends beyond the browser. Many people know her through her long-running series, Code Cartoons, which helps...
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Tim Pearce
Software Engineer and WebAssembly Advocate R&D @BBC
Tim Pearce works as a software engineer and WebAssembly advocate in the Research & Development department at the BBC. He is part of a team which is exploring how the BBC might distribute future audience experiences which are immersive, personalised, interactive and object-based to...
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Taylor Thomas
Senior Software Engineer @Microsoft
Taylor Thomas is a Senior Software Engineer working on Krustlet, Bindle, Wasm, and other open source tooling at Microsoft. He is a regular speaker at various open source conferences and meetups, including various KubeCons and local meetup groups. He has worked on various containers and Kubernetes...
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Matt Butcher
Principal Software Developer @Microsoft
Matt Butcher is a Principal Software Developer at Microsoft, where he leads the team of open source developers that manage Helm, Krustlet, CNAB, Brigade, Porter, and several other projects. Matt has a Ph.D. in philosophy, and is the author of nine technical books. He’s also the co-author,...
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Aaron Turner
Senior Software Engineer @Fastly
Aaron Turner is a senior engineer at Fastly, and a member of the AssemblyScript team. In their spare time, they are hacking on various WebAssembly projects on the web, cooking up some dope beats, and shredding local skateparks.
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Track Host
Colin Eberhardt
CTO @Scott_Logic
Track Host
Colin Eberhardt
CTO @Scott_Logic
I’m the CTO at Scott Logic, a UK-based software consultancy where we create complex application for our financial services clients. I’m an avid technology enthusiast, spending my evenings contributing to open source projects, writing blog posts and learning as much as I can. You can...
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