Late last week, I was collecting suggestions for year-end Hacks blog posts. As she headed out for the winter holidays, apps engineer Soledad Penadés gifted me “a bunch of cool talks I watched this year.”

In fact, it’s a curated collection of presentations from JSConf, JSConf EU, and other recent developer conferences. Presenters include notable Mozillians and opinionated friends: hackers, JavaScripters, teachers, preachers, and hipsters. Many talks come with links to slides. They cover diverse topics: software development, developer culture and practices, developer tools, open source, JavaScript, CSS, new APIs.

Part 1: Sole’s list

• Jake Archibald reminds us: The service worker is coming, look busy!
• Christoph Burgmer presents Hacking an HTML renderer in plain browser-side JS.
• James Coglan offers “Practical functional programming: pick two.
• You can catch Angelina Fabbro on Improving 2D & 3D Canvas Performance on the Web, One Frame at a Time.
• Kate Hudson’s talk, Contributors Wanted: Encouraging Diversity in Your Open Source Project tells how Mozilla Foundation’s Webmaker team has grown the Webmaker community.
• Jan Jongboom is having way too much fun Abusing phones to make the internet of things.
• Watch James Long on Unshackling JavaScript with Macros.
• Glen Maddern takes on GIFs vs Web Components.
• With Play DVDs in JavaScript for the sake of interoperability, Guillaume Marty uses a bunch of new APIs. Here are the companion slides and a link to the project on Github.
• Jan Monschke describes Using the web for music production and for live performances.
• Edna Piranha (aka Jen Fong-Adwent) talks about building Meatspace.
• Lena Reinhard shares an important point of view: This is bigger than us: Building a future for Open Source.
• Philip Roberts asks What the heck is the event loop anyway?
• In a talk titled Signal Processing with the Web Audio API, Jordan Santell shows how to use the Web Audio editor in Devtools to debug what is going on.
• For a bit of JS fun, check out Jenn Schiffer’s What’s the Harm In Sorting: Sanitizing Inputs For More Optimized JS.
• In her talk Animating SVGs with CSS and SMIL, Sara Soueidan introduces SVG animation elements and how they can be used, and shows what advantages and disadvantages they have compared to CSS animations.
• Jaswanth Sreeram presents Parallel JavaScript.
• In Reactive Game Development for the Discerning Hipster, Bodil Stokke offers a fresh perspective.
• Marcy Sutton serves up some Javascript for Everybody.
• Andy Wingo offers his thoughts on Self-hosted JS.

Part 2: Making video better on Firefox

Binge-watching JavaScript talks not your idea of a holiday break? If you’re watching video at all, Mozilla could use your help improving the video experience on Firefox.

Here’s how you can contribute: Download Firefox Nightly, and help us test the implementation of Media Source Extensions (MSE) to support YouTube videos running in HTML5. Over recents weeks, Firefox engineers have been working hard addressing top bugs. To get this into the hands of users as quickly as possible, we need more help testing the experience. Here’s a detailed description of the testing task, thanks to Bugmaster Liz Henry from the QA team.

File bugs using this link. Describe your platform, OS, and the steps needed to reproduce the problem.

Thank you for helping to make the Firefox Desktop video experience awesome. See you in the new year.