JeffConf London 2017 — Recap, interviews & news from the community

Jeff was born 13 months ago (again, not Jeff Barr!)

Ant Stanley, Paul Johnston, and James Thomas announced JeffConf four weeks ago and planned it in less than 6 weeks.

The Serverless community gathered last Friday in London to share ideas, knowledge, problems, and plans for the future.

I can tell it was an amazing event, completely community organized and accessible to everyone. We welcomed an extremely passionate crowd of 120+ attendees thanks to our generous sponsors (including AWS, IBM, Serverless, and more!), but we also have to thank many volunteers who worked hard all day and made JeffConf possible and affordable.

I have been very excited to join JeffConf as a volunteer as well, and today I’m more than happy to share some thoughts and a few highlights from both speakers and community members in the form of shorts audio interviews (accessible textual transcripts are coming soon too!).

Graham, the vicar of St. John’s Church — Thank you Rob Allen for the great pictures!

JeffConf Highlights

JeffConf went sold-out and we even had amazing people overseas paying for 10+ diversity tickets and t-shirts. With a great lineup of 17 speakers, two (un)panels, open space sessions, lightning talks, and plenty of time for networking, I’d say JeffConf was a total success.

Here are just a few highlights that I believe made JeffConf the best Serverless event of 2017 (so far!):

1 — An amazing venue

2 — Incredibly diverse and inclusive panels

3 — The first tech talk in sign language many of us have ever seen!

4 — Pretty good food (veggie and vegan-friendly!)

5 — Real people having fun and creating real connections

Interviews from the Serverless Community

I have been asking two main questions to our speakers:

1. What does JeffConf mean to you, as an active member of the community?
2. How do you see the future (or evolution) of Serverless in 3–5 years?

As trivial as these questions may sound, I managed to collect almost 25 minutes of interesting ideas, opinions, forecasts, etc. If you are curious to know more from the speakers, feel free to comment below or directly on SoundCloud.

Also, don’t forget to like and share the whole JeffConf playlist.

Ant Stanley — Co-organizer

Paul Johnston — Co-organizer & CTO of Movivo

James Thomas — Co-organizer & Developer Advocate at IBM Bluemix

Simon Wardley — Researcher at Leading Edge Forum

James Governor— Co-founder of RedMonk

Graham Hunter — Vicar of St. John’s Church (JeffConf host)

Anne Currie — Co-founder at Microscaling Systems

Patrick Debois — CTO at Small Town Heroes

Chris Swan — CTO forGlobal Delivery Organisation at DXC Technology

Jessica Rose — Founder of OpenCode and Trans*Code

David Blooman — Infrastructure engineer at FundApps

Anna Doubkovà — JS Developer at PizzaHut

Guy Podjarny — Co-founder of Snyk.io

Kassandra Perch — Developer Relations Engineer at IOpipe

What’s coming next?

As previously stated by Ant Stanley here, JeffConf is a community-focused, single-track, single-day, and low-cost event, aimed at the local London and UK community.

But that was only the beginning of JeffConf!

We are collaboratively working on a common set of guidelines to help anyone in the world organize and grow local JeffConfs. I have already started planning the first Italian JeffConf — probably somewhere around Milan or Lake Como.

If you already organize or attend a local Serverless Meetup, I invite you to stay tuned and get involved asap!

This is Jeff. Jeff is Serverless. Be Like Jeff!