The 2nd edition of JSCamp, A JavaScript conference for Romania and Eastern-Europe, took place on the 2nd of June in Bucharest at Radisson Blu Hotel.
The event was organised for front-end developers, engineers and web designers who wanted to learn about more advanced aspects of the JavaScript language or hear about the experiences of great people in the web industry. It was split into four sessions (2 talks per session), about various topics including open-source projects, coding standards, testing, experiences, rendering graphics and even web audio. In-between the sessions there were coffee and launch breaks, where participants could meet with the speakers or other JavaScript enthusiasts.
The day started with Kenneth Auchenberg, who is the tech lead on GoToMeeting Free at Citrix and also started the RemoteDebug project to unify remote debugging. His presentation was called "The future of DevTools with RemoteDebug", and he talked about the power of remote debugging, cross-browser DevTools and why there's need of a common interface to our browsers. He believes that in order for developers to be productive we need to first rethink our tooling.
He was followed by Sebastiano Armeli, a software engineer at Spotify. He has developed and designed applications using JavaScript, Java, Ruby, but he is most passionate about JavaScript and web development. He is the author of the ebook "MVC applies to JavaScript" and a jQuery plug-in to lazy load images called JAIL. His talk "Enforcing coding standards" tried to convince the participants of the importance of coding standards and told them what kind of standards they use at Spotify to ease their lives. Some of the tools and standards used by Spotify are EditorConfig, JSCS, AngularJS style commits, Gulp, Plato, QuickStart, etc.
After the short coffee break, the 2nd session started with Krasimir Tsonev, a front-end developer, blogger and speaker. He wrote "Node.js blueprints" and currently works for TrialReach, a London based health startup. His presentation was called "Crafting client-side testing" and he talked about the importance of having tests, because they allow us to extend and refactor our code with ease. He believes that writing tests makes software development much more interesting and leads to better code.
Felix Palmer followed him. He got into software by writing games in Flash, has a physics background and enjoys combining the visual with the technical. In his presentation "How to build PhotoShop - WebGL not just for 3D", he explained the basics of WebGL and live-coded some image editing techniques like: scaling, translating, rotating, simple colour tricks, blending, warping and pixel effects.
After the launch break, Sebastien Cevey, software engineer at the Guardian, opened the 3rd session. Currently he is lead developer of Composer, the new digital-first CMS. His presentation was called "The reactive loop" and he talked about Virtual DOMs, MVC, data-binding and the advantages of using React/Flux.
The 3rd session was finished by Remy Sharp, the crowd favourite based on the applauses. He is the founder of Full Frontal, the UK based JavaScript conference. He runs his own development and training company called Left Logic and he also built: jsbin.com, html5demos.com, remote-tilt.com, and many others. In "The bits behind JS Bin" he told the story behind JS Bin: how it was originally built in 4 hours, why it moved to Node, and some of the challenges in running the app.
After another short coffee break, the last session was started by Charlie Robbins, founder and CEO of Nodejitsu. He is an open source enthusiast, author of many popular Node.js modules such as forever, winston, nconf or node-http-proxy. In his presentation "Keeping important code alive", between the many Star Wars references and American memes, he talked about his experience in building open-source projects. Having 10+ millions downloads / month he shared that it's terrifying getting so much attention and that he also gets a lot of "abuse" and negativity from the users. Another thing he pointed out is that, when a project gets this big, the author sort of becomes the manager, and needs to get a team.
The day was ended by Jan Krutisch, a freelancing web developer and author of liv3c0der. His talk was called "Javascript patterns for contemporary dance music" and, playing some neat beats using Web Audio API, he demonstrated that music can be coded live in a browser using JavaScript.
Personally, I found the conference very interesting and informative. The speakers and participants were very friendly and talkative and the location was also nice, the conference room, although it was full, didn't feel crowded and the beverages and food were also good. I can't wait for the next edition, which I'll definitely attend again!
by Ovidiu Deac
by Radu Butnaru
by Daniel Donea
