Celebrating JavaScript Developer Day

4 min readMar 7, 2019

In 1995, American developer Brendan Eich created JavaScript — in just ten days and now it is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Thousands of developers around the globe use it for more than two decades but no one has ever celebrated its birthday.

The idea of the #jsdevday

Once in March 2018, my children came to me asking for green clothes as they were going to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day at school. And they even had that infographic prepared at school:

That celebration brought to my mind that we had lots of holidays for different occasions but didn’t have a dedicated day for the JavaScript.
Why thousands of developers didn’t have one more day to have a beer?
So let’s fix it!

The architecture of the holiday

The Last Friday in May

In order to celebrate the holiday, we need to have at least the date. According to Wikipedia Brendan Eich had created JavaScript in May 1995. So the month was decided by Brendan. So let choose the date. Usually, the evening before the weekend is considered to be the best option for celebration.

So let’s treat the last Friday of May as the JavaScript Developer Day.

Attributes and symbols

All the holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day have own set of attributes and symbols. Developers usually don’t like exceptions so we decided to create the symbols.
As a result of long brainstorming and discussions with my friends, we made up a set of attributes and symbols for the celebration:

Have yellow or orange as symbol colors. Like in the logo of JavaScript.
SpiderMonkey and Rhino as main figures. In honor of the first JavaScript engine and cover paper of the first “bible” of JavaScript programmer — JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

All these symbols are common for JavaScript developers and we hoped that they would like them.

Graphic Assets

As we know graphic assets are the most memorable part of each event, and for sure we took care of them too. Designer from Kyiv Kyrylo Shvedov came up with the concept of design for JavaScript Developer Day. He created the assets based on his idea that JavaScript was rich in WAT features and usually JS developer’s first steps looked like a trek through the jungle.

Stickers, wall poster, facebook cover, t-shirts

Why the pub quiz?

Of course, parade or carnival is cool, but we chose a format which could be easily organized and replicated — pub quiz. The difference from the common pub quiz was that instead of questions about geography, politics, and history we had questions about Front-end and JavaScript.

Creating the questionary

With the help of several developers, we managed to collect questions for the quiz, create materials and rules and then distribute them among the people who are interested in having JavaScript Developer Day in their city.
Here you can see some examples from 2018:
1) Finish the quote by Chris Heilmann “Java is to JavaScript what Car is to …”
2) What will the following code return?

3) Guess the javascript framework name