May 14 saw the birth of a new technical conference in Budapest that I foresee a very good future. For a really affordable price we had two days of great talks in an outstanding venue, with good food and open bar after-parties.

The talks were paired in practical and theoretical with Q&A after each speaker and coffee-breaks in between each pair. So here I would like to highlight those talks that impressed me more or I consider most useful.

For the practical side there are two videos that I would make my team watch as soon as they are up.

On Thursday Sebastiano Armeli of Spotify spoke about Enforcing coding standards in a JS library (video); and although it might seem simplistic as something we should already know, by experience I know it’s not like that in every team and it’s good to be reminded. The use of editorconfig and code quality tools like JSHint; automate the build process with Gulp or Grunt; unit testing using Karma and Mocha; standards for the commit messages in order to generate the changelog; and Plato, a tool I have to try to check code complexity.

And on Friday it was Sufian Rhazi with Transform your codebase without breaking a sweat (video) who showed us how the front-end infrastructure team of Etsy transformed their large code-base from CSS to SCSS and its moving now the JavaScript to AMD modules. A lot of nice strategies to accomplish it and one important remark for me, which is the importance of hack days so employees can dedicate their time to investigate and try new technologies.

But the most impressive talks were in the creative side as it was astonishing to see what can be done only with JavaScript.

The first one to blow our minds was Martin Kleppe with his Invisible Code talk (video). I knew about JSFuck before but the things he can write in 140 characters, using 1024 bytes or not using Latin characters at all are extraordinary. You must check the jaw-dropping examples on his website.

Julian Cheal closed the Thursday Dancing with Robots (video) and although half of the widgets didn’t work it was amazing anyway. Like an old magician Julian started to unveil his tricks from controlling the lights of a party to flying (and crashing) a drone with a PlayStation remote. Everything using plain JavaScript and making the audience laugh. It was brilliant.

On Friday Liv Erickson showed us JavaScript for Virtual Reality (video), mentioned Cardboard (and made me start thinking about buying one) and let us try the Oculus during lunch. While Jaume Sanchez Elias with Getting things done with three.js and WebGL (video) did pretty neat 3D stuff.

These were just some of my favourite talks but all of them were of great quality and there are many more worthy to watch.

Pascal Precht was the representative of the AngularJS community and with Dependency Injection for Future Generations (video) deepened into the new Angular 2.

The announcement of io.js being merged back to node.js came on Thursday so it was interesting to watch Fedor Indutny on Friday answering “political questions” after his Diving into io.js C++ internals talk (video).

Stephan Bönnemann had a good point about versioning and described it in We fail to follow SemVer – and why it needn’t matter (video).

And the best possible end for the event was How you can fix your community in one day (video) by Anika Lindtner talking about diversity and inclusion.

Definitely and as I said, a great conference in a beautiful city with a lot of interesting people. Congratulation to the JSConfBP team and see you next year!