Last Friday I traveled to the wonderful city of Paris together with some Hippo colleagues for the dotJS conference.
It was going to be my first tech conference in France and I was really excited. dotJS is a new conference and promoted itself as: “The largest JavaScript conference in France”, which raised my expectations.
The list of speakers looked promising with for instance Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of Backbone.js) and Jacob Thornton (one of the creators of Twitters Bootstrap).
It was a two day conference of which I only attended the first day (second day were workshops).
The rest of this post will be about how I experienced the conference.
The venue
dotJS was held in the beautiful Théâtre des Variétés in the hart of Paris. The venue really looked amazing and the conference covered all floors and rooms of the building. With a sharp looking screen it was really easy to read any code that presented itself on-screen. The seats however were quite small for people like me (or people above 1.70m in general). For those of you that ever flew with EasyJet it was sort of a similar experience. The conference attracted about 500-600 people and the room was packed.
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| Photo taken by @mauriz http://svay.com/photos/2012-11-30_dotjs/ |
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The lunch in the middle of the day was good and there was some real tasty quality food, but making fresh food with about 250-300 people waiting can become quite a logistical problem.
Even though the total amount of attendees were divided in groups the lines were long and everybody had to be in the same room to be able to get some food. I liked the freshly cooked food, but I guess this could be a bit improved with prepackaged lunch boxes or serving food in multiple rooms.
Talks and speakers
These days Javascript is not only used on the client/browser, but also on the server side with for instance Node.js. Therefor the list of speakers was a mix of both and in my opinion contained a lot of knowledgeable individuals. To name a few:
- Jeremy Ashkenas (@jashkenas ; creator of Backbone.js, Underscore.js & CoffeeScript )
- Jacob Thornton (@fat ; co-author of Twitter Bootstrap, Ender & Hogan.js)
- Vojta Jína (@vojtajina ; member of AngularJS team and Google engineer)
- Bert Belder (@piscisaureus ; core member of the node.js team)
- Addy Osmani (@addyosmani ; inventor of yeoman and Developer Programs Engineer at Google)
In total there were about eleven talks, so the day was packed. All speakers had about 20 minutes to talk about their topic which was a nice pace. It helped to stay focused on the talks at hand. There were even some lightning talks at the end of the day, which added a nice change to the conference. The overall quality of the talks and speakers was good and I really enjoyed some of them. However for a Javascript conference there were only just 3 or 4 talks that actually went into technical details and unfortunately most topics were more pointed towards general topics like open source and communities. I thought that was a shame, since there was so much knowledge on stage.
The highlights for me were: Jeremy Ashkenas (“Symbiotic languages”) , Brian Leroux (“How the Javascript language can lead to unexpected results”) and Jacob Thornton (“The history of Open Source”).
Summary
The conference was nice and had attracted quality speakers. Sylvain Zimmer and Thomas Bassetto did a really good job in making dotJS happen. Unfortunately the conference had just a couple of in-depth Javascript talks and therefor did not really meet my expectations. Even though there was no real schedule up front my advice to the organizers would be to make a good balance between general talks and in-depth talks next year. I personally would have expected a lot more in depth Javascript talk at at Javascript conference.