Highlights from JSConf Budapest

This year, I won the first prize at one of our company hackathons — a trip to a conference of my choosing (I'll write more about my team's winning Alexa project in another post). After the great experience at JSConf EU in June, I decided to go to another JSConf, this time in the beautiful city of Budapest.

Based on my previous JSConf experience, I was expecting a pretty great conference; great venue, great talks, and — more importantly — great people. And boy did this conference deliver.

JSConf BP took place at Urania Movie Theater. This building from the late 1900s features the most beautiful theater hall I have ever seen. The pictures really do not do it justice.

What was even greater than the venue, were the people I met at this conference. Other developers from around the world. Co-creators of awesome JavaScript libraries. People who create a visual editor for a genome analysis-related programming language. The intimacy of the smaller conference and the pretty cool party locations helped a lot with getting the conversations going, too. 😏

Top three talks

Now, the venue, the people, and the parties at JSConf BP were great. But the reason why we developers go to conferences are the insightful and work related talks, that will 10x our capabilities as programmers. Obviously. 😉 So here are my personal top three talks.

1. JavaScript Metaprogramming - ES6 Proxy Use and Abuse, Eirik Vullum

   Eirik did a great job introducing the concept of Proxies in ES6 and beyond. I found his use case for shifting the burden of dealing with potentially circular references in complex data structures to the runtime very compelling. It very much reminded me of the data structures in our content management system, and I started playing with proxies for resolving references in our data right then and there.

2. Goldilocks And The Three Code Reviews, Vaidehi Joshi

   SumUp has grown considerably over the past year and our web team is now distributed across three locations — Berlin, São Paulo, and Sofia. In such a situation it can be difficult for new team members to familiarize themselves with our various projects. Moreover, building a close team across such great distances is considerably harder than when everyone is co-located. Code reviews can help a great deal with both these problems! If you're doing more than just commenting with a "LGTM 👍" on Github, you get to teach juniors and work with your remote colleagues much closer than just by chatting with them on Slack or seeing each other in a standup call. With our new team size, we will definitely try 1:1 screensharing and moderated code review sessions. On top of explaining various code review types, Vaidehi also gave a lot of great tips on how to review each others work.

3. Async patterns to scale your multicore JavaScript… elegantly, Jonathan Martin

   While I typically do not work on performance critical and highly async code, Jonathan's talk was a very good demonstration of the elegant new ways ES6/ES2015+ and webworker APIs offer to deal with async. His introduction to concurrent vs. parallel tasks was also pretty neat. 🙂

Conclusion

So that was it, my visit to JSConf BP 2017. It was a really great conference. Apart from the experiences above, one last big thing I take away is the motivation to submit a talk for one of the many conferences next year. Fingers crossed. 🤞