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Chris Williams attended RubyFringe in 2008 and was blown away. A small, dedicated conference where the organizers make sure all the small details are tailored towards the audience feels a whole lot different from the mega-events run by agencies that a lot of us have grown tired of.
The concept stuck with Chris and he couldn’t get it out of his mind to do a ‘Fringe-influenced conference for the JavaScript community. His wife Laura and he stepped up as the curators of JSConf 2009.
When he asked me last fall about my opinion, it took me 3 seconds to see that it only made sense. Prior to JSConf, there was no conference dedicated to JavaScript developers, heck, even the idea of a JavaScript community was hazy at best. A lot of developers do part-time JavaScript in addition to say, Python, PHP or Ruby. Others use JavaScript full-time, but the idea that there is a thread that binds all devs together was missing.
In addition, JS is no longer tied to the Browser. While a majority still happens there (just cf. the newly kindled research in speeding up JS runtimes), JS has a life on its own on the server. Be it Rhino on the JVM or the serverjs group on Google, to the Palm Pre OS that uses web-apps as native apps.
Times seemed tough in the past six months and Chris and Laura certainly took a risk on going forward with JSConf, but in the end it sold out and quite a few people complained about the limited space. I’m glad it worked out eventually.
The 130+ attendees & speakers made good use of the conference location. In the end, most people met everyone else and I think the size was just perfect.
Top Notch. I don’t have any major complaint and I didn’t notice any major glitches throughout the conference.
All talks were videotaped so all of you who couldn’t make it can re-live the experience at home. The food was top notch, the after conference events were a great contrast to the technical days.
Most significantly though, JSConf featured a significant other track. Laura took the non-geek spouses, partners and families out to tour Washington while the geeks hung out at the venue. The concept was a great success (I wish I could have done the tours :). As a result, the after-our events were nicely mixed which added to the quality yet again. Other conference organizers: DO TAKE NOTICE! (thx).
The actual presentations are transcribed elsewhere. I’d just like to point to the great variety: Frontend, backend, middleware and exotic topics (“…and then I wrote this MIDI to JSON compiler”) all had their place. There is a lot going on.
The conference was single-tracked from the get-go, but there was a Track B where interested speakers could sign up for 15-30 minute presentations or discussions and the Track B room was packed both days. BarCamps rule.
Live & remote feedback as well was solving smaller problems were all handled through. The #jsconf search gives you an idea of the impact.
This also means that for the most part, Wifi coverage worked fine, if a little slow. Well done again, it is the little details that keep attendees happy .
JSConf was a great success in that it defined the JS community to be an amazingly smart & talented group that is enthusiastic about what everybody else is doing.
Moar JSConf please.
And good job, Laura & Chris. You guys rock!