In many JavaScript circles, CascadiaJS is the Pacific Northwest’s premier JavaScript Conference. This year’s conference held on November 3rd and 4th was a hybrid event, a virtual conference progressively enhanced with in-person events in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, BC.
Dolby.io participated in the event as both event sponsor and virtual workshop host. Over the course of two days of informational talks and workshops, the Dolby team had the opportunity to meet and engage with members of the JavaScript community in our workshop and in the events virtual spaces via Gather and on Discord.
The event’s organizers did an amazing job of bringing together dozens of technologies to make the experience feel like an in-person event. They provided Dolby, and the other event sponsors beautiful (and retro) 8-bit virtual conference space and booths. This gamification was surprisingly effective as an ice-breaker, and a means to draw-out engagement from even the shyest of software engineers.
A Look Into Gather.Town
Through the Gather platform, attendees stepped into the space with their personalized avatars and roamed around old-school using just the arrow buttons of their keyboard. The real magic happened when two or more avatars were in close proximity, and a spontaneous video and audio conference was spawned.
I chatted with dozens of attendees about many subjects, and one theme was reoccurring; How this experience of walking up to a stranger while at a tech conference is strikingly familiar yet more empowering in the digital world. For some, the avatars added an extra level of initial anonymity, at first, as they could just walk past another attendee without engaging. But, just after a few minutes, most attendees realized the real fun is in engagement in ad-hoc video conferences that connect and build community.
This finding and building community theme is pervasive in the JavaScript community. If you think about how many frameworks and open source projects there are, you soon realize there’s a similar reflection of the diversity within the community itself. Whether coming from a code school or a start-up, this diversity makes a community strong, open, and vibrant.
On day two, I had the pleasure of presenting a hands-on coding workshop titled A World of Communications Apps using Advanced Audio Features. This two-hour workshop was focused on enabling the attendees to get started building their own JavaScript video conference application with the Dolby.io Communications APIs. This beginner-friendly workshop showcased developing advanced features like token initialization, Dolby Voice®, screen-share, and video presentation features. The workshop was also an opportunity to invite participants to the Build The World with Dolby.io hackathon, empowering attendees with enough code examples and knowledge to kick start their own project.
Final Thoughts
Teaching a remote workshop can have its own unique challenges, such as how do you know if the audience is following along or missing a step? Thankfully, we used some simple features of the Dolby-powered Livestorm platform for presenting the workshop. Instant polls and emoji became a good measure of real-time audience engagement. Who’s finished creating their token server? Thumbs up 👍🏽!
Clone and deploy; then code was another pattern we used to create success upfront with workshop attendees. We created content that utilized Netlify’s one-click deployment process, enabling the ability to try out the source code and launch a live function or website with a single click. This meant that, with a few exceptions, the entire audience was able to find that moment we all find so satisfying; entering in those API Keys, pulling a repo, and having the code work within the first few minutes of exploration.
It’s pictures like this that tell the story of how amazing and fun a JavaScript workshop can be with engaged audience members like those coming from CascadiaJS. If you missed the conference, no worries, we’ve made the complete workshop available on GitHub.
Also Published Here.