ScriptConf in Linz, Austria – if you want all the good with none of the drama.

Last month I was very lucky to be invited to give the opening keynote of a brand new conference that can utterly go places: ScriptConf in Linz, Austria.

What I liked most about the event was an utter lack of drama. The organisation for us presenters was just enough to be relaxed and allowing us to concentrate on our jobs rather than juggling ticket bookings. The diversity of people and subjects on stage was admirable. The catering and the location did the job and there was not much waste left over.

I said it before that a great conference stands and falls with the passion of the organisers. And the people behind ScriptConf were endearingly scared and amazed by their own success. There were no outrageous demands, no problems that came up in the last moment, and above all there was a refreshing feeling of excitement and a massive drive to prove themselves as a new conference in a country where JavaScript conferences aren’t a dime a dozen.

ScriptConf grew out of 5 different meetups in Austria. It had about 500 extremely well behaved and excited attendees. The line-up of the conference was diverse in terms of topics and people and it was a great “value for money” show.

As a presenter you got spoiled. The hotel was 5 minutes walk away from the event and 15 minutes from the main train station. We had a dinner the day before and a tour of a local ars electronica center before the event. It is important to point out that the schedule was slightly different: the event started at noon and ended at “whenever” (we went for “Leberkäse” at 3am, I seem to recall). Talks were 40 minutes and there were short breaks in between each two talks. As the opening keynote presenter I loved this. It is tough to give a rousing talk at 8am whilst people file slowly into the building and you’ve still got wet hair from the shower. You also have a massive lull in the afternoon when you get tired. It is a totally different thing to start well-rested at noon with an audience who had enough time to arrive and settle in.

Presenters were from all around the world, from companies like Slack, NPM, Ghost, Google and serverless.

The presentations:

Here’s a quick roundup of who spoke on what:

• I was the opening keynote, talking about how JavaScript is not a single thing but a full development environment now and what that means for the community. I pointed out the importance of understanding different ways to use JavaScript and how they yield different “best practices”. I also did a call to arms to stop senseless arguing and following principles like “build more in shorter time” and “move fast and break things” as they don’t help us as a market. I pointed out how my employer works with its engineers as an example how you can innovate but also have a social life. It was also an invitation to take part in open source and bring more human, understanding communication to our pull requests.
• Raquel Vélez of NPM told the history of NPM and explained in detail how they built the web site and the NPM search
• Nik Graf of Serverless covered the serverless architecture of AWS Lambda
• Hannah Wolfe of Ghost showed how they moved their kickstarter-funded NodeJS based open blogging system from nothing to a ten people company and their 1.0 release explaining the decisions and mistakes they did. She also announced their open journalism fund “Ghost for journalism”
• Felix Rieseberg of Slack is an ex-Microsoft engineer and his talk was stunning. His slides about building Apps with Electron are here and the demo code is on GitHub. His presentation was a live demo of using Electron to built a clone of Visual Studio Code by embedding Monaco into an Electron Web View. He coded it all live using Visual Studio Code and doing a great job explaining the benefits of the console in the editor and the debugging capabilities. I don’t like live code, but this was enjoyable and easy to follow. He also did an amazing job explaining that Electron is not there to embed a web site into a app frame, but to allow you to access native functionality from JavaScript. He also had lots of great insight into how Slack was built using Electron. A great video to look forward to.
• Franziska Hinkelmann of the Google V8 team gave a very detailed talk about Performance Debugging of V8, explaining what the errors shown in the Chrome Profiler mean. It was an incredibly deep-tech talk but insightful. Franziska made sure to point out that optimising your code for the performance tricks of one JavaScript engine is not a good idea and gave ChakraCore several shout-outs.
• Mathieu Henri from Microsoft Oslo and JS1K fame rounded up the conference with a mind-bending live code presentation creating animations and sound with JavaScript and Canvas. He clearly got the most applause. His live coding session was a call to arms to play with technology and not care about the code quality too much but dare to be artsy. He also very much pointed out that in his day job writing TypeScript for Microsoft, this is not his mode of operation. He blogged about his session and released the code here.

This was an exemplary conference, showing how it should be done and reminded me very much of the great old conferences like Fronteers, @media and the first JSConf. The organisers are humble, very much engaged and will do more great work given the chance. I am looking forward to re-live the event watching the videos and can safely recommend each of the presenters for any other conference. There was a great flow and lots of helping each other out on stage and behind the scenes. It was a blast.