The JS Conf EU 2019 was a special 10th anniversary edition. 1500 participants, lots of community events, great atmosphere, top quality food and the full mix of great tech talks you’d expect. From market trends to tech deep dives to more philosophical questions about how the community should manage itself and who has control of the common assets.
There were too many good talks to chose from but here’s my favourite five…
JavaScript: Who, What, Where, Why and Next by Laurie Voss
Laurie Voss kick started the event with a look at trends based on the JS Conf talks and NPM module downloads. A good overview, it’s crazy how the whole NPM and JS ecosystem has exploded in the past few years. On the framework side “React has conquered the web”. The pattern of frontend frameworks doing the tasks that were previously classified as backend frameworks continues. TypeScript’s popularity is soaring as a more comfortable way for previously backend developers to start in the JS world. Too many trends so it’s worth watching to get the full overview of trends.
Simulating Sand: Building Interactivity with WebAssembly by Max Bittker
A great example of the powers and speed that WebAssembly can offer for mobile development. Max talked through his love of “falling sand games” and how he’s built and optimised his sandspiel.club Along with challenges of naturing a community that sometimes causes problems. He also had my favourite slide:
The Economics of Open Source by C J Silverio
CJ’s view is that the JS package system “should not be in private control” she wants to “take back the commons”. Her talk focus’s on the fact that the interests of the community and VC funded private firms are not aligned. Rather than just a rant, she’s released Entropic, a decentralised registry https://github.com/entropic-dev/entropic, as a solution.
Tensorflow.js Bringing Machine Learning to the Web and Beyond by Nick Kreeger & Nikhil Thorat
Tensorflow have created an end-to-end open source machine learning platform. Live real time browser side body tracking (check out their demo here) or see how you can analyse pictures in 10 lines of code.
JavaScript’s Journey to the Edge by Ashley Williams
To me Ashley set the gold standard for tech talks. A great presentation, clear and simple slides, excellently delivered with a story line and metaphor that made the complex message easy to understand. Get started with JS processing at the edge by understanding where to cook, store and deliver your pizza! Definitely worth watching.
The full speaker list is here: https://2019.jsconf.eu/speakers/The videos are being released and are or will soon be available here: https://2019.jsconf.eu/videos/
A big thank you to the whole JS Conf EU team for putting on such a great event.