ScriptConf 2017 in Linz

Thanks to Netconomy, some friends and I had a lovely trip to Linz last Friday for ScriptConf, a one-day JavaScript conference. The event started at 1pm, which was extremely convenient for us as we could use the morning - and the beautiful weather then - to drive north from Graz, grab a quick lunch and be there just in time for the talks to begin! Definitely a nice advantage if you’re living in driving distance! But never rely on that as I learnt the hard way 2 years ago 😉

Anyway, back to ScriptConf! This was the first conference organized by this crew but you wouldn’t have noticed it. The schedule was near-perfect, the venue excellent, the catering great; in short: The organization was top-notch! Perhaps the only aspect I didn’t like (but that’s a matter of opinion) was the session length of 40 - 50 minutes. Personally, I prefer 20 - 30 minute-slots but that’s just me 😊

Usersnap, one of the sponsors, had also a beautiful plush alpaca everyone made selfies with in order to get a chance to win an iPad … or simply because it was so cute! Sadly, it didn’t want to accompany us back to Graz 😞

Now with all the meta out of the way, let’s get to the main attraction: The talks:

• Christian Heilmann presented the opening keynote about the state of the JavaScript community using buffets as a metaphor. Criticizing some parts of the community he presented a basic etiquette for everyone inspired by how everyone should normally behave at a buffet and how to apply that here.
• Next, Raquel Vélez from NPM gave an overview over how npmjs.com evolved over time: Like how they came to pick React and Hapi and the story about search on the site 😉
• After a quick coffee-break, Nik Graf gave an introduction about the server-less architecture with a focus on orchestration and how the infrastructure around the containers are defined.
• In case you were not up-to-date with Ghost’s road to 1.0, Hannah Wolfe definitely changed that. So many great stories about why certain things were done in a particular way!
• Before dinner-break, Felix Reiseberg from Slack gave probably the best talk about Electron I’ve seen so far! And all that with live-coding!
• Wanted to know more about how to profile your code on V8 with some additional knowledge about internal caches? Franziska Hinkelmann had you covered!
• Last but not least came Mathieu Henri with a live-coded demo-scene’esque audio-visual presentation. Party before the party!

The moment the talks make their way online, don’t do cherry-picking. Just watch them all 😉

This amazing day ended with a nice little party were everyone got one last chance to relax, talk to some of the speakers and collect stickers (Big thanks to Raquel for the custom NPM stickers ❤️) before heading home. As with everything else, even this final schedule-entry was perfectly organized.