How did we come up with the CityJSConf
Just like any developer, I have always been happy to attend conferences. They give me an opportunity to meet other developers, learning from their experiences and stories. I go back to work having learnt something new, motivated to do more exciting stuff!
Last year I took over a successful meetup from Guy Nesher, and got more involved together with Miloš Simić, Lucy Ernest, Anett Soos, and James Coward to organise the JS Monthly meetup here in central London, getting to know the community, meeting speakers, attendees and that’s where I met Leo Furze-Waddock.
We both went to the FullStack 2017 conference and during a break Leo introduced me to Dylan Schiemann, having attended his regular HalfStack meetup. We got to speaking about Dojo 2, a major update to a framework Dylan co-founded back in 2004, and he started to explain why they had chosen to go with TypeScript. It’s a big topic and a 10-minute break over coffee wasn’t going to be enough to answer all the questions I had at the time, including should I use Typescript instead of JavaScript.
As we all know TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and as Leo and I have an ASP.NET background, we were really confused whether we should just go with TypeScript, familiar to a C# dev or should we embrace JavaScript and perhaps the functional programming paradigm gaining popularity, or both?
Leo recommended I go to Luca Mezzalira’s London JavaScript Community meetup as Kyle Simpson was giving a talk. A few days later, I heard Kyle’s new presentation talking about developer clans, giving consideration to other developers reading code and how developers tend to dictate to others style and approach. At that point, after hearing his talk I thought:
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get this guy to be on a panel or debate with Dylan Schiemann about JavaScript, TypeScript and even the wider development experience. Perhaps together we could answer many questions!
I was so determined to do this, I met with my meetup team, Leo and Christopher McDonald, another JS Monthly meetup regular, to plan a way for Kyle and Dylan, both of whom live in the US, to be in London together for a debate. I shared my idea with Luca and Dylan and with Kyle and we were all up for it!
The event got bigger day by day and we also added 11 speakers from London, and the rest of world, some of which are:
Speakers include :
- Alex Lakatos, from Mozilla and Nexmo,
- Jonathan Fielding, from Beamly
- Stephanie Nemeth from Werkspot and co-organiser of Stupid Hackathon Amsterdam
- Yan Cui a serveless expert
- Lucas Fernandes da Costa , from the Chai core team and a Sinon maintainer,
- Mark Wubben from AvaJS, Dojo and IstanbulJS,
- Kadi Kraman from Formidable Labs
- Kartik Venkatesh from Trunomi
and Philip Stockwell from Microsoft
The debate/panel talk has now become the main event that will take place around 4pm. What I am also very happy about is that, Luca Mezzalira and Simona Cotin have agreed to moderate the debate talk.
Also there will be workshop opportunities from Kyle Simpson:
- 27th of March — Javascript: The Recent Parts
- 28th of March — Node Fundamentals
We’ve also had great community support from the London Node User Group, the London FrontEngineers, CodeBar, Women who code, HalfStack Conference , Devit Conference from Greece, and the London JS Community.
This has proven to me how the London’s Tech Community is united in supporting community growth and collaboration, which gives me so much confidence with organising more events like this in the future.
Also I would like to thank Thanasis Polychronakis for his help, a lot of his past experience helped our event to happen in just three months.
Last week, we met with Dylan and Kyle and recorded our first pre-debate topic: Is the JavaScript typing system sufficient, do we need TypeScript and Flow? Listen to it on YouTube:
Part 1/3
Part 2/3
We will be broadcasting the final part this week.
I am sure our quest to find what is best for our development efforts and overall direction of the JavaScript language, will continue after the event, but I am also sure that every developer that attends, or even hears it online, will come away with a better understanding supporting your next project decision.
Thanks to the companies and communities supporting us including IG Index, Utility Warehouse, Trunomi, DAZN, JavaScript Works, JavaScript Weekly and others. I’m so sorry if I have forgotten to mention someone!
We have a very limited number of tickets remaining. We hope to see you at CityJSConf on the 26th of March, 2018!
