I loved the first edition of JSConf Budapest and I couldn’t miss it this year, so I spent the past week in Budapest enjoying a new edition of the conference.

Workshops

One of the novelties were the free workshops held on Tuesday, probably with the idea of making people attend the one-day CSSConf on Wednesday, and I picked the Nodebots workshop by Markus Leutwyler.

I flew to Budapest on Monday and it was worthy because the workshop was super fun and interesting. We felt like going back to the school assembling and decorating our bot; and we even had to solder some cables. At the end we made it move programming the Arduino with the JavaScript platform Johnny-Five.

Mosaik, the co-working that hosted us, uploaded to Facebook a really cool video of the event.

Talks

The conference was located at the Akvárium Klub which served both as conference room and dance hall. While the talks lasted only 30 minutes without Q&A; although speakers were around to answer any question.

Jake Archibald as master of ceremony was brilliant with really funny moments and stories. And the wow of this edition were Tim Pietrusky and Martin Schuhfuss with the NERD DISCO (video) performing live music and controlling the lights from the web to start the after-party.

Performance, web audio and empathy were the big topics during the two days and there was some good talks about it.

Denys Mishunov in Why Performance Matters (video) had an interesting perspective of performance not being mathematics but perception.

Suz Hinton showed her NYC subway audio project in The Formulartic Spectrum (video) and encouraged us to use our creative side because “You deserve a break from being judged”.

And it was great to see Oliver Joseph Ash Building an Offline Page for theguardian.com (video).

For beginners Laurie Voss had a good overview on What everybody should know about npm (video).

While “The best request is a request not being made” is the motto of Stefan Baumgartner in HTTP/2 is coming! Unbundle all the things?!? (video).

Claudia Hernández with her talk Down the Rabbit Hole: JS in Wonderland (video) did a great job uncovering the quirks of JavaScript and reminded me of Martin Kleppe blowing our minds last year.

But the best talk for me was the closing Works On My Machine, or the Problem is between Keyboard and Chair (video) by Lena Reinhard because as long as our society, and specially our industry, doesn’t change being more inclusive, these kind of talks are needed to open our eyes. “Now is the time for us to debug the Tech industry”.

Conclusion

As usual this is not all but what caught my eyes. Living now in Amsterdam is easy to be up to date, due to the numerous amount of meetups and events organized in the city, and therefore is harder to be surprised.

But still JSConf BP is a great event, nicely organized and for a fair price. In 2017 it will switch dates to September 14 – 15, leaving the spring free for the return of  JSConf EU.