Vancouver JS Meetup Recap

This is a post from PayrollHero Senior Engineer Suman Mukherjee who recently arrived in Whistler, Canada from the Manila, Philippines office.  #AdventureEngineer

On February 12th, the PayrollHero dev team in Whistler travelled down to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver JS meetup. We reached town a bit early, so we spent some time coworking from Launch Academy. Later in the evening, we went to SFU Harbour Center where the event was being held. Around 150 people attended the event. Two top notch speakers presented in the meetup. Robert W. Hurst of Chloi presented a talk on LucidJS and Perter McLachLan of Mobify presented a talk on Mobile performance.

Screen shot 2013-02-28 at 12.11.32 AMRobert’s talk on Lucid started with giving us some background of event driven programming, how events are emitted and handled and we can structure our javascript around that pattern. Then he introduced LucidJS, a library, that he has been working on. Lucid allows you to set custom event, chain your events and even pipe your events together. Lucid also successfully handles subevents. The event emitters in Lucid also provide meta information about the event bindings and triggering. The library lets you encapsulate any object (not restricted to DOM nodes) and turn it into an event emitter. Specifically when used with DOM elements it allows you to take full advantage of the meta events. Robert’s talk gave us some new insights into the world of event driven programming.

Peter was the second speaker. Peter’s talk was mainly focussed on performances of apps on the mobile browsers. He shared the concept of adaptive websites, one that is not only responsive, but adapts itself based on the device. He discussed several strategies to optimize client side performance like trying to minimize JS and maximize the use of CSS, conditionally loading assets and keeping the DOM tree light so that it is easy to parse, simple CSS selectors, watch out for libraries that generate lengthy CSS selectors etc. Peter shared a list of common JS functions which restructures the DOM and how that affects the performance on mobile devices. He also discussed some other low hanging fruits like gzipping resources and non blocking scripts in the beginning of the page. This can bring returns at the lowest cost. He also showed us how the optimization strategy of domain sharding has become an anti-pattern. He also discussed how in some cases prefetching resources based on a user’s common pattern of navigating a website can be very effective in delivering content faster. Peter’s slides are also available on speakerdeck.

Both the speakers were awesome. It was the first meetup I attended in Vancouver and totally loved it. Those who love JS and are live close to Vancouver can sign up for the VanJS meetup group here.

– Suman.

Press Release: PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding

PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding To Continue Product Development And Expand Sales/Marketing Efforts In Southeast Asia

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PayrollHero’s time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution helps companies manage their workforce through a cloud based, web and mobile solution that is built for today’s employees.

SINGAPORE, Feb. 20th 2013 – PayrollHero, a software company focused on time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for Southeast Asia has announced today that is has closed a $1M CAD seed round of funding from 500Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies) and other angel investors.

With offices in Manila, Philippines and Whistler, Canada, PayrollHero is a subscription based cloud software platform that uses the employees face and GPS location as the metric for clocking in and out to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time.  The company enables transparency between employees and management around time, attendance, scheduling and payroll via attendance analytics.

PayrollHero was created out of necessity from company founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger.  They had set up a Philippine outsourcing company and could not find a suitable time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution so ended up building their own.  After showing their internal system to other business owners in the Philippines who expressed similar dissatisfaction with the options available they decided to look deeper into the Philippine market and the rest of Southeast Asia.

There was a really big opportunity in Southeast Asia for a time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution that was in the cloud and built for web and mobile.  We set up PayrollHero and set out to become the market leader in this space,” said PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson.

PayrollHero currently supports payroll for companies in the Philippines and plans to expand its payroll capabilities to other countries within Southeast Asia in the near future.  The companies time, attendance and scheduling solution works worldwide and currently has users in Canada, USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.

We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines

With this injection of funds, PayrollHero can add talent to its “Adventure Engineering” team and continue to add new clients to its expanding client base.

PayrollHero makes payroll sexy, and they make lots of money doing it!  It’s one of those few cloud-based services that every business, from SMB’s to large enterprises, can and should use to increase productivity and save costs.  The ability to scale PayrollHero is limited only by the number of businesses that want to improve employee attendance, scheduling, and payroll,” said George Kellerman, Venture Partner, 500 Startups

For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com

About PayrollHero
PayrollHero.com – Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness
Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll in the cloud for web and mobile.
We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood.  For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.comhttp://www.payrollhero.com/press_kit