Cycle iterations: how did the HolyJS conference go, and what about the next

In sports there is an expression “after the game is before the game”: from the moment when the match ends, it's time for players to prepare for the next one. The conference preparation cycle looks similar. Only this weekend, HolyJS 2018 Moscow died down - and we are already announcing the May HolyJS 2019 Piter (and now, at the start of sales, the cheapest tickets are).

Because of this, we decided to combine both topics: we will tell you how Moscow’s HolyJS went, and in this story you can see if you want to go to St. Petersburg. What were the differences of this HolyJS from the previous ones? How did the reports go and what was interesting besides them? Finally, for what at JS-conference could solemnly hand over a T-shirt "JAVA"? All answers are under the cut.

Playground

Two differences from previous HolyJS were known before the start. Firstly, the new venue, and secondly, for the first time all the tickets were sold out, and we had to stop the sale. Well, that is, as "had to" - theoretically it would be possible to sell more, but the participants would become very closely.

But in the end it turned out to be crowded, but not to such an extent that it became a big problem. There is even an opinion that such a density is for the better: the participants were socializing more actively than if everyone had settled in different corners.

Difficulty arose except that in cases where the hall was particularly crowded on particularly popular reports. In this case, another new product of this season, the demo stage, helped: a small open stage right in the hall, which served two important roles at once. During the breaks, it was used by sponsoring companies to give a small technical presentation or take stock of the competition (it is more convenient to do it with microphones than on a stand). But during the presentations, it became possible to display the most popular of them on the screens of this scene - and allow viewers who had no place in the hall to watch the live broadcast in the hall while drinking coffee.

There was also a novelty among the stands: in addition to the sponsoring companies, this time the PiterJS community also participated.. At their booth, in addition to the Code for the Dark contest, which is already traditional for HolyJS, one could try one more time. Alexander Korotaev , who earlier sensationalized the browser version of Heroes of Might and Magic, now made a new game:

As you can see, it also has a connection with the "Heroes". But this time, the project took noticeably less than two years.

Reports

There is a difficulty: the conference went on for two days, if you start to describe how to write reports from it, then no one will read the text to the end. In addition, we have not yet fully gathered viewer feedback, which allows to determine the leaders. So instead of detailed coverage we limit ourselves to individual facts.

Cyril's report z6Dabrata Cherkashin on working with binary data, despite the far from the most common topic, gathered a bunch of viewers. Some of them did not like the detailed explanation of the transfer to the binary number system (“we know this from school”), but it seems that it was interesting for everyone to “gut” the GIF format. So much so that later in the speaker’s room, Cyril told his report again: in English for the English-speaking speakers who surrounded him.
MPJ , known as the YouTube channel Fun Fun Function , performed with keynout, so no hardcore was required of him - and instead he urged the public to discuss how to prevent bloatware. "In Photoshop, there are even video editing tools, it can be put in the dictionaries as an illustration of the concept of feature creep!"
And if the MPJ seemed too “light” to someone, it was easy to compensate for the feeling with many other reports — for example, Lucas da Costa’s beautiful name “Charles Bukowski’s) powerful functionality in the content.
At HolyJS, it was possible not only to play the new game of Alexander Korotayev mentioned above , but also to learn everything about her: Alexander's new report was dedicated to her.
Although the words “machine learning” and “javascript” are now rarely found nearby, Isa Silveira thinks that this is temporary - and spoke just about their intersection.
No one is immune from force majeure, and at the last moment, Alexey Kozyatinsky (Chrome DevTools) fell ill . But it was then that the decision of the program committee to prepare “spare reports” (when over a report that was not included in the program, the work is still conducted as it did) came in handy. Thanks to this, the replacement by Andrey AndreyNagih Naked 's report on the real experience of using WebAssembly happened easily , and it turned out not a “spontaneous plugging of a hole than it is necessary”, but a full-fledged presentation on a relevant topic.
Finally, Roman lahmatiy Dvornov not only spoke about data science in the closing keyout, but right at the end of his speech he published a new project on GitHub that helps to work with data.

There are pictorial abstracts of some reports: we are not sure that they will help those who did not see the report, but you can admire anyway.

Other

And what was valuable, in addition to reports? For example, traditionally for HolyJS - discussion zones, where you could properly ask any speaker. Since this time it was a bet on the authors of the tools, these zones became particularly relevant: is it often possible to ask Michel Weststrate directly about the intricacies of MobX? It came even to the point that someone brought a laptop with a specific problem in the working draft, but they usually still asked about more general things.

And the BoF sessions, where the same Weststrate talked about the stete, and Tomas Watson and Ujjwal Sharma from the Node.js Core team talked about Node, and it was possible not only to listen reverently to them as on the reports, but to discuss with them.

And the party where the band "Scientific and Technical Rap" performed. To describe how the public accepted their ironic IT songs, we’ll give just one detail: we even liked the English-speaking speaker, who put on texts and translated them on the go.

More on the site was attended by leading podcasts "Frontend Youth" and "Frontend Weekend". Tweets from the scene actively appeared in the first podcast , for the second one several interviews were recorded on HolyJS - in general, follow their next releases.

There was something for people not present at the site. For viewers of online broadcasts (and limited free on YouTube , and paid with a choice of all the reports), we interviewed the speakers, so that during the breaks between the reports a boring cap did not hang for half an hour. We have already done this before, but now we tried to change the short 15-minute interview format to half an hour, but it often turned out “well, we just got to the most interesting.” It seems that this was the right decision - with people like Ari Lerner or Ilya Klimov , there is something to talk about for half an hour.

And what about JAVA?

Okay, tell. Like last time, the program committee conducted the activity of “TCXX”: you could write your own proposal for improving ECMAScript. In addition to the main prize for the best offer, there were nominations for “game” and “button accordion”. T-shirt "JAVA" was given in the "game" category, but the proposed solution itself was even more impressive than this t-shirt: "let us have another back in the cycles, except the continue option, and then we can go back to the previous iteration." Truly game!

HolyJS 2019 Piter

What can we say about the next HolyJS?

First, we will announce the dates: May 24-25, 2019, St. Petersburg .
Secondly, let's call the first speakers. David Khourshid is the creator of xstate , he could not get to the last HolyJS, but we hope to see him next. And Basarat Ali Syed is the author of an open source TypeScript book with more than 4,000 stars on GitHub .
Thirdly, the idea of “bringing authors of popular instruments” has proven itself, and we intend to continue this line.
Fourth, although the program of the next HolyJS will become known later, the format of the conference itself is unlikely to change significantly. And this means that if according to the description of the last conference you felt “I am interested in such an event,” then you should pay attention to fifth:
Tickets are already on sale, and right now they are the cheapest of all, and will gradually become more expensive in the future, starting from December 1st.

In general, the conference cycle continues to be executed, and we move on to the next iteration! And then this post can be considered the very option back: it allows you to go through the last iteration again.

Tags: