CityJS virtual conference 2021 — A roundup of DAZN’s contributions and our favourite talks
DAZN was a gold sponsor of CITYJSCONF LONDON virtual conference last week and we contributed to the event with a virtual booth on the interactive platform Gather Town. We all miss in-person events and the chance to connect with people in the engineering world from outside of DAZN, so this gave us the chance to talk to people about what we do and promote our brand as well as getting to see what cool things other people/companies are doing.
We also gave out some one month free gift codes to access the DAZN platform so that we could really show off our product!
We held a panel discussion at our booth where we talked about what DAZN is, our ethos as a company, how we empower our engineers and how to start a career with us. This was a great way to really get our voices heard at a virtual event which has its limitations in regards to being able to reach out to people easily. We live streamed on Twitter and had over 200 views! Click here if you’d like to watch it back (disclaimer - technical difficulties were encountered!) 😆
We also had two great speakers from DAZN delivering talks on the main stage at the event, Denis Artyuhovich (Software Engineer) - ‘Infrastructure as Code for JS applications on AWS with TypeScript’ and Max Gallo (Principal Engineer) - ‘Micro-frontends: a migration story on the edge’.
Both talks were very well received and had good engagment with Q&A sessions after.
The virtual platform had between 100 and 200 attendees each day but the talks were also live-streamed on YouTube so the reach was actually thousands of people from all over the world - which is an amazing achievement for CityJS being a non-profit organisation and 100% community founded and run. Thanks to DAZN, the other sponsors and 54 speakers the conference has been able to remain successful during the pandemic.
50 of our own Engineers from DAZN attended the conference and watched many of the talks over the three days. Being new to software engineering myself and having recently started a role in DAZN’s DX team, I particularly enjoyed Shodipo Ayomide’s talk ‘Technical Principles of Developer Experience’ - you can check out his Twitter here.
Here are some words from David Rubio Vidal (Platform Engineer - DX) @ DAZN.
It was the first time I attended a CityJS Conference, and I couldn’t be any happier. I would like to thank DAZN for, first sponsoring this great initiative, and, second giving me the chance to attend.
I probably watched 70 or 80% of the talks, and having such variety of talks, it is hard to pick the best ones. However, this would be the top ones from my point of view:
iPuzzler: Building a Pure JS Web Component - Dylan Beattie
Dylan is such an artist, no wonder he does things with computers, code, comedy, music and video. Amazing talk that engaged the audience from start to end in a “funny” way to explain how to build crosswords using Javascript.
Building Fullstack with React, Express and Couchbase - Eric Bishard
This talk was a workshop that touched every aspect of the stack: frontend and backend (including the Couchbase database). The workshop was rightly paced and Eric was very attentive to incoming messages from the audience, answering questions as they were coming in.
Fun fact, the talk overrun for just 1h and 10 mins. But every minute was worth it.
Related links: GitHub / Website / Workshop code
Game Development with JavaScript - Katie Walker
Yes, this is Katie talking about Gaming with JavaScript. I was not aware of making games by just using JS, but apparently you can. If you need a starting point to begin the journey of developing your games, don’t miss this talk.
Did we (b development) lose the right direction? - Stefan Judis
This is not a pure technical talk but, if I may, a philosophical overview of where we come from in JS world, the current state, where we are heading to, and if we are moving in the right direction. Stefan delivers the talk with great pace and keeps you hooked for the whole duration of it. A must watch!
Related links: GitHub / Website / Eleventy
Want to see beautiful transitions? Navigate this site - Just stunning.
An Introduction To IoT (Internet of Toilets); - Joe Karlsson
Do you want to have fun and learn cool things at the same time? If so, then watch this talk. Are you curious to learn about IoT? If so, then watch this talk. Joe is a very funny (and knowledgeable) dev that delivered this excellent talk (with the help of his cat). 😺
Authentication, authorisation and security for modern client-side applications - Kati Frantz
Security. Oh, security! What would be a conference without a talk about security? In this case, Kati gave us this very well organised talk to cover authentication, authorisation and security. You can feel he is very knowledgeable and able to provide easy explanations to a not-so-easy topic. Totally recommended.
Fun with JavaScript and Sensor APIs - Mandy Michael
As the title suggests, this is a fun way to learn about Sensor APIs and how to use them with JS. A lot of sparkling (literally) stuff in this talk perfectly delivered by Mandy. If you think that interacting with sensors was difficult, watch this talk and think again.
Related links:
GitHub / Website / Codepen profile / Codepen collections
Don’t miss the chance to see how the speech recognition fails to detect the right words due to Mandy’s aussie accent!
My favourite talk of the conference has to be
A developers guide to low carbon websites - Tim Benniks
I must confess. When I saw the title, I was going to skip this talk. What a mistake that would have been! This is by far the most eye-opener talk that I attended. I wouldn’t know where to start, so I just recommend you to watch this talk from start to end and follow Tim’s work.
I asked him the question if “he had any tutorials/videos/guides about how to make low carbon websites” and he said “no”. BUT! It gave him the idea to potentially start a series of videos to talk about. Looking forward to it!
Related links: GitHub / Website / YouTube channel
