Some Words about the ReasonConf Attendees and Community
The date for ReasonConf 2018 is coming closer but we still didn’t have the chance to talk about the Reason community and especially about the people you will meet at the conference.
Software and technology is only as strong as the people behind it. Building a productive and friendly ecosystem requires strong social and open source skills.
And let’s be honest here: especially in JavaScript, it’s quite hard to find the right candidate who satisfies all the technical, social and idealistic needs.
Let us explain why you, either as a company or individual, might be interested to join our conference and why it’s worth to be a sponsor.
But first of all: What is Reason and why should I care as a company?
Reason is a new language by Facebook, which is built on top of the reliable and established OCaml ecosystem. It’s especially popular in the ReactJS community, since it offers first class support for ReactJS and is being used to develop the Facebook Messenger app.
The Reason project tries to tackle several important pain points in the React & JavaScript community:
- Make functional programming paradigms (like those in ReactJS) approachable for JS developers
- Build even more type-safe programs than with other typed-JS tools like TypeScript & Flow … This is especially important for mission critical software with no fault-tolerance
- Offer performant & optimized JS output, without many compromises
- Bring and keep developers in the Pit of Success
You will find more technical details and why Reason might be a good fit for your company in another article called “Reasons to support ReasonConf” by Andrey Okonetchnikov.
What companies care about Reason & OCaml?
There are many other big industries and companies leveraging the OCaml (and partly Reason) platform, such as Bloomberg, Facebook, JaneStreet, Docker, Citrix, Issuu and many more.
We were really surprised when Accenture, one of the biggest consulting agencies in the world, reached out to us and said they want to sponsor us. After we thought about it and talked to them, we realized that keeping track of emerging technologies is key to get ahead of competitors and outperform them on the long run.
Now let’s talk about the community and conference attendees
There will be around 180 attendees at the conference. Most of them are fluent with ReactJS and also see the bad parts of pure JavaScript codebases. They are enthusiastic about technology and put a considerable amount of time and effort to make the Reason ecosystem better on every release.
The background of our community members is vast. Many of them were on the lookout for a functional language which is also more approachable for their coworkers. They tried Haskell, ClojureScript, PureScript, Elm, Scala, Elixir and other similar languages, which don’t really fulfil the aspect of being “JavaScripty” enough to be easily understood by their colleagues. Luckily for us, some of them got stuck with Reason.
They build things like type-safe GraphQL queries with Reason-Apollo-GraphQL or highly efficient, natively compiled, single executable graphql-servers, which are also preventing essential runtime bugs and outperform Node.js with ease.
Also there are efforts on building a natively compiled, slimmer version of webpack, called fastpack. Other projects like Esy try to eliminate unacceptable build times of native dependencies in a CI environment. Esy is a package-manager designed for building, tracking and caching native dependencies in JS and OCaml projects, while being compatible with the npm workflow.
As the conference organizers, we have a personal interest to get as many of these great minds in one place, since we are also contributing to the Reason project and want to get the most out of it.
We invited experts such as Cheng Lou (Facebook), Jared Forsyth (Khan Academy), Keira Hodgkison (Culture Amp), Cristiano Calgagno (FB Infer Project), Sven Sauleau (Babel), and many more — to educate and inspire our attendees.
We believe that most of our attendees are interested in complex technical challenges and are motivated to push forward technical innovation for better products and better engineering.
So what’s the progress?
The organization of ReasonConf 2018 is coming along quite nicely so far. We finalized the schedule, booked the flights and hotel for our speakers and also made sure that we have a really nice venue for all 3 days.
There are a few ideas which we can only make happen with stronger financial support, therefore we are looking for sponsors to make this event awesome.
By sponsoring our event, you will not only get in touch with highly talented JavaScript / ReactJS engineers, but you will also give your employees an opportunity to learn about upcoming web technologies in the heart of Vienna.
If you are interested, please get in touch.
Email: hi@reason-conf.com
Website: https://www.reason-conf.com
Patrick, Nik and Andrey
