NordicJS – not your conventional StartUp-event

I attended Nordic JS, an event for the JavaScript community, where new and different inputs are shown and spoken about. The goal is to inspire and get inspired by others, but also with the simple goal to bring the community together, a chance not often given to nisch-communities. It was a two-day event, 8-9 September in Münchenbryggeriet in Stockholm. I attended it on the second day for a while, and many speakers where on the schedule.

Except being a conference-like event with speakers, Nordic JS focus a lot on activities. Even though I did not participate in any of them, I think they are worth mentioning, as I like the concept:

• Techno Ping Pong – they describe it as a night with smoke machines, lasers UV and ping pong.
• Dinner with strangers – they will pair you up with five other people that you don’t know at a restaurant of their choice.
• Festen – the after party for the event, and also a celebration of the capital of Sweden with its wonderful techs and startups.
• Mini Sumo Robo Clash – the name says it all, a sumo robot workshop.

The topics that the speakers brought up were different. Even though I barely know anything about programming and JavaScript it was quite interesting. Here are a few words that could be said about them:

Vitality Friedman spoke about cutting-edge responsive web design. One of the important things he mentioned was the navigation on a page. It all starts with the navigations, and therefore it should be very clear, and also not in any way disturb the scrolling. Of course he talked about phones too, and added an interesting point; most users only use their thumbs, which all developers should have in mind. The scale of logos and slogans was also something he talked about.

Lin Clark talked about”Performance in React”, React being a form of library in JavaScript. Here, the level was a little bit too high for me to get a good grip of it. But on her summarizing slide, there were four thing: (1) keys, (2) shouldComponentUpdate, (3) immutability and (4) using setState() or connect() at lower levels. Maybe some of you JS-people understand these things better!

Per Stenström was a bonus speaker. Just before lunch he had a couple of minutes, where he criticized an article by Tantek Celik which stated that curlable Java content (had to look it up: Content where you can use the cURL command tool to request the URL) can’t be found on the web with search engines. What he did was actually setting up a website himself and at the speech testing the thesis in the article and tried to find it in different search engines. He didn’’t seem too used to speaking in front a large crowd, but it was something different.

Per Stenström walking off the stage.

Even though JavaScript is not my biggest interest it was nice to see that there were plenty of others who actually were very passionate about it and enjoyed the event a lot. I think it is a great opportunity for like-minded people to get together. We don’t hear a lot about these nisch events, which was one of the reasons I chose this one – to enlighten you all about them, because they deserve it. These people are creating the things we search through all day.

Possibly the greatest JavaScript conference. The speakers, city, party and all the small details in between. [1]

– Jakob Öhman — Attendee 2015