Jeremy Lund

ASTs, or abstract syntax trees, are tree-like representations of your code. Once your code is represented as an abstract syntax tree, you can perform all sorts of tasks on it, such as analyzing your code for problems or transforming it. It fact, many tools that you use today, such as Babel, Prettier and ESLint leverage ASTs to perform their work.

In this talk, I’ll talk about what ASTs are, and we’ll look at some examples using AST Explorer. Additionally, I’ll show how you can use jscodeshift and recast to automate code changes on your existing code base, including examples that I have done on my own code base. Why take hours performing tedious and error-prone manual changes, when you can automate them in minutes?

I remember when I was going through my college engineering math courses. On a regular basis we were introduced to new concepts such as differential equations, integrals, and Fourier transforms. While learning these was fairly straightforward, what frequently tripped us up on tests was the algebra: the fundamentals that we’d learned several years’ earlier.

I see a similar problem today. With so many language features being added to JavaScript, such as generators, async/await, and promises, and so many new libraries and frameworks, we often forget the fundamentals: the powerful functions available on Array and Object. These functions can make it easier to filter, extract, transform, and summarize data. In this talk, I’ll go over the fundamental functions and language constructs that Array and Object provide. Whether you’re fairly new to JavaScript or are a seasoned pro, it’s good to review the fundamentals.