JSDay Canarias 2017 review
Reached goals in the first Javascript event held in Canary Islands
Event summary
Event origin
JSDay Canarias 2017 is a social event, focused on the computer science professionals and students and specifically aimed to the Javascript programming language.
Our motivation in order to hold this event has its roots on similar events that take place at mainland level, such as JSDayES, T3chFest or Codemotion but if we pay attention at region level, we have the PyDay Tenerife as local example of this kind of events.
We thought about create thee JSDay Canarias 2017 when we were participating as attendees in the last PyDay that was hold on Tenerife. At the end of this event, we were thinking about if there was a similar event in Canary Islands focused on the Javascript programming language.
After a deep research we concluded that there was no results, so we had just a single option: we must create it.
And we did it. In three months we were able to design, planning and hold the first Javascript event done in Canary Islands.
Goals
We know that Javascript is growing quickly into professional environment due in one hand to the new features provided by the ECMAScript standard and, in the other hand, due to the multiple open-source development tools that are been created by representative companies of the sector such as Google, Facebook or Microsoft. All these tools are allowing to create more robust and powerful web applications that at the same time, are gaining the attention of more and more professionals toward Javascript.
Based on that and knowing the high amount of job offerts that every day are published and the volume of web development professionals that are using Javascript, holding this event we wanted to energize and consolidate a community of development professionals and students whose were interested on this programming language, at regional level.
In order to reach this goal, the first event day were hold a total of 16 talks that covered multiples aspects and tools used by professionals during their day-to-day work.
Besides that, in order to solidify the exposed concepts, the second event day were hold four workshops where all attendees, following the teachers instructions and using some of the tools exposed the previous day, were able to create a fully operative application, from the beginning, covering both parts of the web development: FrontEnd and BackEnd.
In the other side, holding this event we wanted to be a nexus between companies that were interested on finding talent and therefore publishing their current job chances.
Finally, one of our main goal was that the whole transmitted knowledge cannot be lost and it must be accessed for event attendees and general public in the future. Based on that, all talks were recorded and published on the official Youtube channel of CanariasJS.
Target
Based on the eminent technical sense of the event, it was mainly focused on computer science professionals, specifically aimed to the web development sector.
However, we were aware that nowadays young people will be professionals in the future. By this reason, we also will that students be part of the event in order to get a deep learning about the use of web development tools that are been used today and more importantly, how these tools are used by professionals. This way, students can have a broader vision of the goals to which they can aspire.
Keeping that in mind, due to it was a completely new experience in Canary Islands and after carefully assessing the situation and our resources, we defined that the maximum amount of attendees will be fixed to 80 people.
To this volume of people we had to add 16 speakers, 10 staff people and multiple visitors.
Following this strategy, at the end of the event we had reached the amount of 126 participants along the two event days.
Talking about data, we got the next genre based on distribution:
If we talk about where attendees were from, we get the next result:
Inside the professional vector, we obtained the next classification data:
Location and date
In order to hold this event, we obtained the cession of César Manrique Professional Training High School, located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
The school management team provided us all needed facilities along the whole weekend of 11th and 12th of November, 2017, including attendees reception areas and technical resources.
Attendees registry
In order to attend the JSDay Canarias 2017 it was required a registry through the Ticketea platform that was used for ticket selling, attendees management and the event publishment.
The inscription fee had a symbolic value of 5,00€ that must be paid by the attendee. This way, the whole pool of tickets was published the 25th of October at 12 o’clock and the 80 available seats were sold out in less than 12 hours.
In addition, in order to preview possible attendees setbacks, we defined a peer to peer ticket transfer protocol. This way, if someone who had purchased their ticket cannot attend at the end, he or she could be able to transfer their ticket to another person.
Event structure
The event took two days long.
The first day was the 11th of November and it was started at 8:15 hours and concluded at 19:30 hours, having two rests in the morning and in the evening, and the additional rest for breakfast.
On this first day we had 16 talks, managed by professional developers and given out on two parallel tracks, following the next structure:
This was the attendance behavior along the first day:
The second day was the 12th of November and it was started at 8:30 hours and finished at 19:30 hours, having as in the previous day, two rests in the morning and in the afternoon furthermore the additional rest for lunch.
This day was only focused on holding four workshops of four hours long each one, where some of the tools exposed on the previous day were used.
The goal of these workshops was all attendees, following steps provided by teachers, were able to develop a whole application from the beginning, covering both sides of a web application: Front End and Back End.
Workshops were held in parallel so, the Front End session was run at the same time that the Back End one. This way, after the lunch break, the same workshops were switched and people that attended at the Front End session in the morning, could attend to the Back End in the afternoon.
Once said that, the sessions distributions was next:
And this was the attendance evolution:
Social Media
The whole social media strategy was managed through the Twitter platform via the #JSDayCAN2017 hashtag. Based on that, 496 messages were created by a total of 119 users and all of them generated 176.182 reaches and 337.635 impressions.
In previous and during event days, the hashtag was used following the next behavior:
In the other hand, the hashtag was used from the next sources:
Attendees feedback
In order to improve and keep growing it’s important to know the opinion of our attendees so this is the feedback that we received from them, evaluated over five points:
Speakers feedback
The assessment of the speakers without whom the event could not be carried out is also really important for us, so that the feedback we receive from them was the following:
Sponsors
This kind of event cannot be held without the support of professionals and sector companies. Due to that, we want to thank to Omnia Infosys, S.L., CIFP César Manrique and Expero Inc. its trust in us.
Collaborators
We also have a special mention to our collaborators which helped us organizing and publishing the event, so thank you so much to GDG Tenerife and Gamika.
Event managers
The event has been managed by two people. They were responsible for planning and organizing the event in addition to the communication with speakers, assistants, collaborators and sponsors.
Their professional profiles are next:
Dailos Rafael Díaz Lara
Currently I’m working as Full-Stack developer using Javascript technologies.
I have a more than five years long background in computer science working as developer, analyst and team manager. In addition, I was previously working as industrial engineer for five years, designing, planning, implementing and coordinating industrial facilities project.
As side project, I’m currently involved in the educational project named BoscoverySAT (https://boscoverysat.github.io), handled by the La Cuesta Salesian School, which goal is design and build a CubeSAT 1U satellite for ham use.
Linkedin | Github | Twitter | Medium
Iván Bacallado Trujillo
Currently I’m working as Front-End developer using Javascript technologies.
I have a more than seven years long background in computer science working as network systems technician, helpdesk and Front-End developer. In addition, I have been involved in several startup projects, managing development teams.
Linkedin | Github | Twitter | Medium
In order to focus all organizational and communication efforts, we created the CanariasJS trademark.
As well as the next Internet representation:
