JS � Character Encodings

What is the focus of your work today?

I work on Node.js. That is pretty much my job description. I get to work on the core software, on the platform itself. There have been two parts that I've been working on. One is our test suite, it has a couple of flaky tests, which can be annoying, and I’ve been trying to fix some of them. The other thing is something that I pushed forward a lot, namely bringing Workers along the lines of Web workers to Node.js. While the feature is stable now, and has been for a while, there's still a number of things that we do: improving documentation, improving performance, and working out some really weird edge-case bugs.

What is the motivation for your talk?

I realized that the talk is a bit off for such a conference, it's not about bleeding-edge features, it is very technical and it is about problems that have been around for a while. But it's still something that I'm passionate about. I have given talks about this general topic, about character encodings and how they work in JavaScript, a while back, a couple of years ago at smaller conferences. One motivation for this is that we keep getting issues around encoding issues on the Node.js GitHub issue trackers: It's just something that people tend to keep messing up.

How would you describe the persona for your target audience?

The target audience is definitely developers. I would consider it an intermediate talk, but also targeted at beginners: When it comes to things like encoding issues, in my experience beginners might be people that want to get things to  “just work”. But once things just work, they tend to stop diving deeper into these issues.