JSConf Colombia 2017 Recap
What an amazing conference!! it’s my second time attending this conference not only because I live in Medellin, the city where the event takes place, not because I love Javascript (despite of haters), I attend the conference for its amazing organizers team, for the amazing speakers and work-shoppers and its amazing attendees.
The Organization Team
(Disclaimer: some of the persons that belong to the conf organizers team this year are personal friends)
This year JSConfCo organization team seemed to be bigger than past conferences (not sure of this). This group of people is conformed by persons that have been contributing to local JS communities, they’re not simply doing JSConf, many of them have an active participation in helping the Colombian JS community to grow. They’re putting a lot of effort to create an international conference that is becoming stronger after 4 versions. I want to thank them for being such good leaders and human beings, and giving the opportunity to the colombian software community to listen live speeches from the many JS influencers world wide.
The Speakers
Suz Hinton started the day with an amazing speech about how live coding helped her to be a better developer, I saw her inspiring a lot of women that twitted her their thanks for the speech. It’s amazing how you can improve your skills by sharing your coding sessions online, thanks Suz (if you have the chance of reading this) for coming to Colombia and share your valuable knowledge with us.
Myles Borins, we had the opportunity to have the NodeJS TSC director in our country. He did a funny speech, like he was writing to his diary, about how the NodeJS core contributors team has broken many times the NodeJS ecosystem by releasing new versions of node, how they handle this kind of situations. Myles it was an honor to have you here and we expect this is not the only time you visit us.
Francisco Vílchez, this peruvian guy told us how he and his team created a machine learning app that is capable to create Jazz music compositions. I was amazed with their work and the story on how they built it. He couldn’t do a live demo because he was having sound issues with his laptop, but he showed us one of the compositions this software made in the past, awesome! Thanks Francisco for sharing your project with us!
Kim Crayton this amazing woman told us about how she’s been working to help engineering communities to become more diverse. She also fell in love with the conference and offered through twitter one day of her job to a local company. Thanks Kim for teach us some tips to make engineering communities more human.
George Mandis showed us how he uses Javascript and midi controllers to create web apps that interact with this kind of hardware. I’m an empiric musician and George has inspired me with his speech to start researching about how to create music with my midi-controllers + html + JS. Thanks George.
Mathias Bynens spoke about how V8 Javascript engine works and manages our javascript code. He taught some good practices in how to write better code. Thanks Mathias!
Emily Plummer talked about accessibility and how to improve our web applications to get to people that has accessibility issues, also showed us some examples outside the software and IT and how they improved people’s lives. I loved your speech Emily, thanks for sharing!
Miguel Useche showed how to improve our web applications performance with web assembly, I didn’t know anything but the name of this new way to create web apps, also I got amazed that it uses c and c++ code, I’ll do a try to this because I’m always aware of performance in the apps I build. A lot of thanks to you Miguel!
Helen Holmes taught us some tips about how to get designers into our codebase, awesome tips that us as developers should start using in our projects.
Elba Sánchez put the local quote and gave us a speech in how she got to frontend code being a backend developer, and how she didn’t die trying. Thanks Elba, I’ve felt identified by your story and haven’t died too, lol.
Thomas Watson showed a demo on how he can build a radio network and control remote devices with Javascript, an amazing speech and demonstration, Thomas was sick at the time of the speech and despite of it he gave us an incredible one. Thanks Thomas, hope you’re getting better!
Tom Dale gave us the best speech (in my point of view) of the conference show us how amazing is glimmer.js to improve front end rendering performance, he had some technical difficulties he handled them really good. Thanks Tom!
Diversity Scolarships
The organization team created this program for helping people that doesn’t have the chance to come to the conference, they allowed 50 persons from Venezuela, Chocó (Colombia) and other locations to get to the conference this is a fantastic way to help people with low resources to participate in one of the best technology events in Latin America. Kudos to the JSConfCo organizers!!
I had the opportunity to talk with some of the people that took these scolarships and they were really thankful to the organizers.
You Need to Come the Next Year
If you haven’t came to this event, come to 2018’s version, I can assure you won’t regret. The colombian Javascript community is glad to have you here and attend the conference. And we also hace a lot of other conferences like ng-colombia an Angular conference that will take place at November 18th 2017. Also we have .NET Conf CO v2017 that takes place at November 9th. ScaleConf that takes place at April 27–28th 2018 and RubyConfCo that took place the past september but will take place at 2018 again.
No matter which country you are coming from, we’ll be glad to have you here and will try to be the best hosts for you!!
My name is Camilo Montoya, I live in colombia and software development is my passion and my profession. I’m also a senior Javascript developer and freelance consultant, currently working with ReactJS and nodeJS microservices, also currently learning VueJS. Sometimes I create music in my freetime and enjoy my time with my beloved wife. If you want to contact me I’m at linkedIn or at twitter as @camilomontoyau
