Once, Twice, Three times a community (event)

Sunday. April 27, 2025 - 3 mins

Once. Twice. Three times a community. . . event.

And I loved you all ❤️

The tail end of last week turned into a developer community tour, taking in the sights of London and Bristol. What started as a laid back JavaScript meetup in the back streets of the capital rolled into a full day developer fest at the gateway to the SouthWest.

All three gatherings had their charms, and whilst there’s too many amazing sessions to mention. . . there were a few memory highlights in my mind!

The London JS meet put four speakers onto the stage. I took a lot away from Akash’s talk on his note OCR project. Tauri seems like an interesting excuse to go beyond a hello world with Rust. Whilst I’m knee deep in MAUI at the moment, this feels like a good alternative for my desktop app needs and an opportunity to bring out my inner JS script kiddie!

Salmas session was a funny look at the history of the web, that was laced with laughs throughout. I won’t spoil it in case you get a chance to see this at a future event, but put this one at the top of your ‘must see’ list. It also reminded me that environment dictates performance. . . as it sparked two great ideas for a talk of mine. Thanks Salma!

After a day bumbling around London the following day, it was time for the main event.

CityJS.

As always, this was a great gathering of the JavaScript community from London and beyond. The vibe is different to most other confs, with the community love present throughout every conversation.

There are three talks that have stuck with me days later.

Liran delivered an interesting look into security in an LLM driven world. In just 20 minutes, he highlighted a few different potential gotchas. . . one of which I’ve unfortunately incorporated into a project. Thankfully, I now know how to re-work it at a high level, and was introduced to Snyk to help catch future issues at source. 🙌

Jo spilled the Deno tea, highlighting both the power of the tools Playgrounds and the power of a transparent text area. Getting an opportunity to try out and deploy an alternative to node without the kerfuffle is pretty nifty. Looking forward to trying this out, and diving into the code behind Jo’s editor in the coming weeks.

Matthew demonstrated the power and benefits of an event driven architecture. Whilst not suited to every development use case, our modern devices offer so much power that they SHOULD be doing more than being a simple web portal into a server. The cost reduction and potential environmental benefits are astronomical, and it’s great to see this style of dev making it into production.

At this point, I didn’t think the community vibes could be topped.

Until I rocked up at DDD SouthWest with Toby and Dan from the Classic Cottages team.

This wasn’t a conference. It was a collection of friends and acquaintances getting together to geek out. The talks from Aaron (the io influencer), James Gaisford, Jo Glombek, Dylan Beatie, and Cliff Agius all rocked.

Sure.

But it was the conversations around them that was the highlight. The dev community in Bristol seems pretty special. The critical mass of developers who took a Saturday to up skill and talk all things dev made it feel more like a party than a conference. Perhaps next year we should have funky hats as part of the dress code

Whilst the buzz was amazing, I do have a bone to pick now that we’ve come to the end of the rainbow.

Bristol ain’t the South West!

But naming is the hardest thing in development, so I’ll let it slide 🤣

Great work Praveen, Aris, Carl and the teams around you.

Originally featured on LinkedIn.