Zurich JS took the roof off

Zurich. You rocked!

And nn a way most communities struggle to do after a few events. Let alone the first one.

Friday saw the inaugural ZurichJS conference happen in the Swiss capital, bringing together a handful of speakers from around the globe to educate and entertains hundreds of developers from central Europe and beyond. The crowd walked away with enough knowledge and insight into the depths of the JavaScript ecosystem to shape the next few months of development time.

But this is just the start.

It was the first large scale event from this community. But you wouldn’t have known it. The lineup was straight out of a A* conference. The level of polish exceeded even the biggest and most established community events of this ilk. Every touch point had a level of polish that we organisers would love to incorporate into our own gatherings, but fail to find the time for. And I’m sure the audience would agree for their interactions as well. Being trusted with one half of the hosting duties truly was an honor.

Zurich itself is a beautiful place, filled with friendly faces much like the event. As long as you don’t want to be singing the earworm that is baby shark late at night (I’m looking at you Salih 👀), you’ll have no problems as a stranger in the city. Great public transport combine with wonderful sightseeing opportunities, and people who will tolerate pigeon German with a smile on their face.

Its a wonderful culture to experience, and I learned a lot about from the stage and beyond:

• 3 minutes behind schedule is a much bigger thing to the Swiss than it is to most
• The people are much less reserved than most audiences on the continent
• Cheese is a way of life, not an ingredient

I’m fully on board with the latter 🧀

More importantly, the tech lessons dispensed from the stage are sure to have taken the rooms plans for the year ahead up a notch. With cutting edge CSS from Kevin Powell, deep debugging tips from Mark Erikson, and lessons in taste from Tejas Kumar to name a few of the sessions, we collectively walked away with knowledge you can’t simply summon from the depths of an LLM.

And that’s the whole point of conferences.

To learn what you didn’t know you needed to learn.

Whatever your training budget is for events is, invest it in this one and make the effort to take the trip. It was perfectly executed, with an abundance of friendly faces milling around the venue creating the buzz of a community that has been thirsting for something like this for a very long time.

Knowing the level of effort the organisers put into this one, the quality of talks they’ll look to curate again, and some spilled tea from Mummy Faris, the next edition is going to surpass this one by a long stretch.

That I’m sure of.

What I’m not so sure of is if we can surpass the noise level in the room at the end of the day. At 105db, it was litterally hazrdous to health.

Regardless, we will try.

Sorry to the audience if you walked away from the event with sore hands and throats from all the clapping and cheering. Consider it yet another contribution to your amazing community on the big day.

Awesome work Züri 🙌

Host photo by Alexander Brandt and noise warning photo by Tejas Kumar