NodeConf Barcelona 2017, A Retrospective

Podiums discussion at NodeConf Barcelona 2017

It was with immense passion and pleasure that the team here at blended.io worked tirelessly to bring another NodeConf to Barcelona.

But, this isn’t about us, it’s about the event itself. So, without much further ado, let’s get down to the retrospective. Let’s see what we did well, and what we can do better next time.

By The Numbers

NodeConf Barcelona 2017 was the second NodeConf to be hosted in Barcelona (the third, if you count WeNode). In 2015, the first NodeConf Barcelona attracted roughly 100 attendees, with 13 speakers, mostly from Europe, with 4 out of the 13 speakers (31%) being female.

This year, NodeConf Barcelona attracted 150 attendees from 15 countries. We had 12 speakers, from inside and outside the European Union, with 5 out of 12 speakers (42%, an 11% increase) being female.

But it wasn’t just by the numbers that NodeConf Barcelona did well in 2017, the feedback from both attendees and speakers was also phenomenal.

Really an awesome couple days connecting with the people at @NodeConfBcn — thanks for a fantastic event. Until next time @PatrickHeneise!

— admc (@admc) April 9, 2017

@abrausewetter @NodeBCN @PatrickHeneise it was a fantastic conference with a sublime organization!

— Luca Maraschi (@lucamaraschi) April 8, 2017

The Inspiring Talks

This year, we had a lineup of 12 amazing speakers sharing their learnings and thoughts on a variety of NodeJS and DevOps topics. As always, we strive for diversity and greater representation at our conferences. So, we were very happy to welcome speakers from outside of Europe, as well as have 5 out of 12 speakers (42%) be female. Hopefully, next year, we’ll cross the 50% boundary on that one!

Jan Lenhardt: Kill All Humans

Jan opened the day with his ‘scarily’ titled talk: “Kill All Humans”. Luckily, all the attendees survived this informative session about development tool automation.

Whilst you should watch Jan’s session yourself online, our favourite takeaways were:

• Hauptversionsnummernerhöhungsangst: The German word for fear of increasing the major version number
• Semantic Versioning makes the ecosystem and library usage reliable as you can see by the number if this is a breaking change to your code
• Greenkeeper keeps your libraries up-to-date

Thanks all for being a great audience at @NodeConfBcn. If you have any question about @greenkeeperio @hoodiehq or @couchdb, find me ✌️

— Jan Lehnardt (@janl) April 7, 2017

Watch the video

Myles Borins: Canary in the gold mine — smoke testing

“Kill All Humans” and now canaries? I’m starting to see a worrying theme here… But, Myles kept it light with his insightful talk about smoke testing, and how you can test for potentially project-breaking changes in your code.

“Dear Diary, today we broke the internet.” — Best diary I’ve heard of, amazing stories of a release manager.

View the slides and review the source on Github

Watch the video

Bryan English: Signet: Safely Curl Pipe Bash. No Seriously!

In his session, Brian English talks about Signet, a tool for safely managing packages and installing software.

Watch the video

Anna Henningsen: Node.js � Character Encodings

Get an understanding of UTF-8 and how character encodings can break your software. Even in the Emoji-rich times of today. Anna shares her best practices for storing and transmitting strings in their Unicode form.

View the slides and watch the video

Irina Shestak: knock-knock-who-there-file-compression-talkFINAL2.tar.trz.bz2.gz

In her talk, Irina shares some great knowledge about speeding up your NodeJS applications and sites with the effective use of compression.

View the slides and watch the video

William Kapke: The Node.js Organization: Behind the scenes

What’s going on behind the green curtains of Node.js? What’s the Node Foundation? How can you get involved? William answers all of your questions in this fascinating and informative talk.

Watch the video

Thomas Watson: Build your own JavaScript powered radio

Bring back the radio! And hack your car keys. Make Javascript interact with the real world with this talk about hardware-hacking radio frequencies by Thomas Watson.

View the slides and watch the video

How will bulletin boards and news systems work in the world of the distributed web? In his talk, Luca shares how he has built a scalable pub/sub system using UpRing, and how you can do it too.

View the slides and watch the video

Daniela Matos de Carvalho: Let’s play with HTTP/2

HTTP/2 isn’t coming up next, it’s already here. Prep your servers and understand how to provide better web performance with the next generation of this vital protocol.

View the slides and watch the video

Useful links:

Logan McDonald: Using Node in a serverless world…

Can you run your application or service without the high costs of servers and infrastructure? Logan thinks that some of you can, and that most of us will be able to in the future. See how in her forward-looking talk.

Watch the video

We’ve all heard that chatbots and conversational UIs are the future, but how do you build them? Eva was kind enough to share with us her insights into the creation of conversational bots and how you can start building them today with Amazon Lex.

It dawned on me how hard it is to run an event with laid back atmosphere AND Shinkansen punctuality! Congrats @PatrickHeneise @NodeConfBcn

— eva (@lavigi) April 10, 2017

View the slides or watch the video

James Snell: The Node.js Process, Making decisions that impact a massive ecosystem

How do you make decisions that affect millions of creators and consumers worldwide? It turns out, as James Snell shares, with a little care and a lot of planning.

Watch the video

Collaborator Q&A

In this short session, some of our 2017 speakers and Node collaborators answer your questions about NodeJS now and in the future.

Watch the conversation

Transparency Report

For the sake of transparency, here are the financials for NodeConf Barcelona 2017. If you’d like more information about these expenses, or some advice on financing your own conference, we’re happy to have a chat. Please reach out to [email protected].

Please see the entire report here (then scroll to the end).

Conclusion And Thank You

First of all, a big thank you to the Mobile World Centre and its team to host and support us!

If we had to describe NodeConf Barcelona 2017 in one word, it would be “Inspiring”. It was truly great to see so many people attend this years conference. To bring together great speakers from around the world to talk about a subject close to their heart. And to meet so many people excited about NodeJS and its future.

A thanks must go out to all of those who made this year’s conference possible. A thank you to all of our speakers, to our sponsors, to the team at Blended.io who organised the conference, and to those attendees who made the event possible and so enjoyable. We couldn’t do it without the hard work and contribution of this great community.

This year’s conference was a great success, so please follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on the next NodeConf Barcelona.

Thanks for reading. We at blended.io are incredibly excited and passionated about the potential innovative leaps for software design and engineering in fintech, investtech and industry 4.0. Get in touch!

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Originally published at blog.blended.io on April 11, 2017.