Introducing ValenciaJS

Let’s talk about JavaScript — and communities

After some years as a Mozillian, I’ve seen how communities work and what kind of things they are capable of. A community is a group of people working together to -usually- change something. In that process you don’t only change others, you also change yourself. You and everyone around improve as individuals. That’s why the best way of learning is by teaching.

I spent some time organizing mozilla-related events in Valencia and since then I saw that the developer community wasn’t that powerful as I could imagine. Well, that’s actually not true: they are some local communities of developers from languages as Ruby, Python or even a specialized one as the group of Drupal users of Valencia. At the time of writing this article I just got a notification that a new community has been founded: WordPress Valencia. Special mention to tech events such as Betabeers or Frontenders that every month host great talks.

Despite all of this, I didn’t found any community that was directly empowering the Web by talking his language: JavaScript.

The state of JavaScript in Spain

I’ve seen quite a lot of movement in the startup scene in Spain, making web developers a target for head hunters. A startup 101 is the following: hire the best and choose wisely, because that person will have a huge impact on your product. You are not a giant corporation, so look for someone that does the job and adds value to your team. That being said, we had a problem.

Web development is definitely an active professional sector. Since the location of the developer doesn’t change the final product, people can work anywhere without any problem (see Remote). This happens in any digital work: you can be a writer from Russia working in a Canadian publication.

We have been looking for developers to help us build and improve Mindrop. The first time was really, really hard.

Finding a good JavaScript developer was a difficult task. We interviewed some good ones, many of them were working in other companies outside Valencia.

Valencia is growing and it has been doing it from some years thanks to initiatives as Demium Startups or the well-known startup accelerator Lanzadera.

They are companies doing amazing things but there’s not enough people. There’s no enough specialized developers taking the frontiers of the Web platform and moving them forwards.

That’s why ValenciaJS was born.

Empowering Valencia developers

ValenciaJS is a meetup for people that hack JavaScript. It’s meant for people who wants to push their limits by sharing experiences and knowledge.

We met for the first time at GeeksHubs, a developers hub near the Mestalla football stadium.

@bbotella joking about JavaScript forms

The conversation started by a brief introduction of everyone: “what are you working on?” and “what do you want to take away from ValenciaJS?” were two questions that everyone answered.

After a successful first meetup, we already have our talks repository, where everyone can jump in and propose new talks or workshops. We also have a newsletter to keep everyone tuned of what’s happening.

We have two proposals for the next meetup: “Flying JavaScript monster” (advanced) and “Introduction to Front-End tooling” (introductory). Hopefully we will be hosting AngularJS and MeteorJS workshops soon.

Life is too short to do crappy things. Let’s do it big.

Thanks to GeeksHubs and the Mindrop team for all the help to make the first meetup possible.