Chetan Padia will show the journey of taking COGS - an immersive theatre and escape room control system - from an single-user desktop app to a web-based multi-user collaborative app.

First Chetan will tell us how COGS works, who uses it, and why. We'll also learn why Electron is a good choice for COGS, the core concepts of Electron, and some of its challenges.

Next we'll answer some questions:

• Why was COGS so slow at times? Who suffers?
• Why do we want real-time collaboration? Who benefits?
• Can we use our new features to make COGS much faster? (Hint: Yes)

We'll explore the design of a real-time collaborative system built from scratch on top of React and Redux, including some inspiration from the games industry to keep things feeling like a native app. Next we'll see a number of problems which were solved along the way including authentication, data marshalling, time synchronisation, and more.

There will be some code snippets but expect this talk to be more focused on design decisions and problems solving rather than diving deep into code.

Chetan heads the software team at Clockwork Dog, the creators of COGS. Clockwork Dog build interactive experiences using COGS for large immersive theatre shows and also provide COGS as an off-the-shelf system to businesses around the world.

We welcome people of all backgrounds and experience levels, so whether you've got a few years under your belt, or you're just starting to look into development we'd love to have you along.

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