NordicJs 2014 - day 1

NordicJs is a JavaScript (surprise!) conference held in beautiful Stockholm. I couldn’t attend in person, but NordicJs offered a free livestream from the event. I think that is just fantastic for the community and since the event was sold out I don’t it had much (negative) impact on the conference economy.

Livestreaming and SilverLight

However the livestream was the nest of a bit controversy. The livestream required SilverLight to work from a desktop machine and there were quite a few frustrated tweets about this.

Here’s a polite and reasonable example:

Most people (including @webbfyra)got it working by installing SilverLight I believe (judging from tweets.).

Off course it is a bit ironic that a JavaScript conference needs Silverlight. NordicJs had worked with Viasat to provide the live stream, so it was no really NordicJs’s fault.

Despite the irony I think the decision to stream the event was very good. The recent coldfront conference in Copenhagen did the same. I also think it was a good idea to do the streaming with a partner that knows about streaming. I believe the conference organisers already have plenty of things to do - so outsourcing the live stream seems reasonable.

SilverLight is available for quite many platforms and the streaming also worked on linux (for one guy at least):

What to do about it?

Next time I think NordicJs should prepare the user at signup to the liveevent what platforms that are supported/working. (Or if possibly use a technology that works without plugins).

I was happy to see that people on twitter helped each other to make the the live stream work.

Finally I think the hardcore complainers should remember that the live stream is a free way to go to the conference. Complaining about things that volunteers provide for you for free is not very nice. To be fair I only saw one two persons being a bit rude (sorry while I was writing this another one showed up).

Conference rules

In a perfect world it should not be necessary, but NordicJs chose to be very explicit about the conference rules regarding harassment.

I think it should be standard for all conferences. I miss the policy on the NordicJs website though. That would be a suggestion for an improvement.

The Venue

Off course I can’t say much about the venue premises, but I did see the stage!

So the surroundings look like this:

Livestream Followers

It’s not the same as being there in person, but it’s alright…

The Talks

I’m not going into the talks too detailed, I guess the talks will be online at some point, but here’s the who-aboutWhat-tweets:

Robert Nyman: “Five Stages of Development”

Robert Nyman talked about some of the new stuff in the firefox/mozilla dev tools. Very, very cool.

Emily Rose: “The instrument of the geek: the keytar”

I made up that title because I didn’t notice the title. Emily Rose didn’t really have a talk/presentation in the classical sense - in stead it was a demo of the new(?) instrument - the keytar.

Sergi Mansilla: “The Fourth Dimension”

I think Sergi Mansilla renamed the talk to something different, but anyway the topic of the talk was functional reactive programming.

Leah Culver: “Dropbox APIs for JavaScript developers”

Leah Culver gave a number of example of use of the dropbox JavaScript datastore API and the dropbox JavaScript chooser API.

Jina Bolton: “Style Guide Driven UI Design”

The talk by Jina Bolton was in the CSS land and in spite of that it was good. :) Jina talked about using style guides integrated in the CSS-land code.

Caroline Drucker: “I’m a feminist and so can you!”

Caroline Drucker’s talk was a “soft” talk about feminism/discrimination.

Here are some reactions/citings:

Kim Joar Bekkelund: “Writing Beautiful JavaScript Tests”

Kim Joar Bekkelund talked about testing the JavaScript in the frontend.

Lightening talks

Then there was the lightening talks.

Conclusion

NordicJs looks like a really promising conference and I hope I have time to see day 2 and go to the conference next year.