JSday 2019
- 3 minsThe 8th May marked a monumental personal milestone.
JSday, part of the Grusp family of events, is a two day JavaScript gathering hosted in Verona, Italy. With a list of past speakers to drool over, it was an honour to be small a part of this events heritage by giving my first international talk. The task was simple. Deliver some fresh beats, rhymes and unit tests to an unsuspecting audience and close off the first days content.
The event, now in its 9th year, is a celebration of all things front end with a lean towards future JS trends and deep dives into current topics. With a mix of local(ish) and travelling speakers as part of the line up, it acted as a melting pot for ideas and knowledge exchange from across the globe.
Amazingly, all of the sessions I saw were interesting with none that I wished I’d skipped and plenty that I wished I caught. This is a testament to the curation of the lineup. Whether it was a look at the node event loop, a rewriting of RxJS, highlighting the benefits of Elm.js during the refactor process or an overview of Web Assembly, something was gleaned from all of the talks.
One notable highlight came via Eli Schutze, who looked at the importance of internationalization and some of the common pitfalls. Whilst this has always been on the radar I’d never fully appreciated the importance of it.
I18n === A11y after all.
Currently, English is the most used language on the web with 58% of sites written in it. Only 25% users actually speak it. Spot the issue. Whilst it’s still the most common, when you dive into the second, third, fourth places and beyond, the disparity becomes apparent.
Whilst the scale of projects I’m currently working on don’t really require multilingual copy, it could offer a good opportunity to play around with it. I was especially surprised to see how many useful helpers are already baked into JS, but…… but daren’t look at the browser compatibility charts. Progressive enhancement anyone?
The most impressive session came from Max Gallo, principle engineer at DAZN. Many a speaker has included live coding in a talk. No one (that I’ve seen) has pulled it off as well as Max. Not only did he reimplement elements of RxJS in under 50 minutes, he explained every line in depth whilst coding and made it understandable by someone (me) who didn’t have a clue what RxJS was, or where it fitted into the broader web ecosystem. IMO, there are few things more difficult to do than these two from the stage….. with 200 pairs of eyes watching you.
With my event organiser hat on, JSday was super impressive. The tracks were well balanced, as was the content from top to bottom. Every question to the team, whether over the group chat or in person, was responded to immediately. Speakers were VERY well looked after….so much so I felt like we were being fattened up for Christmas at times! I definitely picked up a few things that I’ll be bringing back to Future Sync.
If you’re considering speaking at this conference, I’d highly recommend it. Seriously. Submit NOW! Likewise if you’re thinking of attending… especially if you can work it into a longer visit to the beautiful city of Verona, get your ticket. I know I’ll be back for another visit one way or another in the coming years.
Overall, it was a great experience. The only regret is that there wasn’t enough time to explore more of Verona. Next time for sure. With my current workload, fitting it in has been a real stretch even without the extra time to explore, but one that was well worth the effort.
Special thanks to Cirpo for connecting me up with the event team and, as always, to Becky for the initial nudge down this path all those years ago.
Until the next iteration…. ciao bella.