Node+JS Interactive is a wrap! The event was once again held at the same location as last year’s Node Interactive so the event was set up to be a success. And a success it was, with almost 80 talks and workshops, the new “Community Corner” and the add-on Collaborator’s Summit which included the wildly successful Code+Learn (153 new commitsto Node.js core!)
The event, hosted at the Vancouver Convention Centre in British Columbia, Canada, ran from October 10-12. IBM served as Platinum Sponsor for prior Node Interactives, and was proud to act as one of the Platinum Sponsors for Node+JS Interactive as well.
The venue rests in Vancouver’s idyllic waterfront, with water, forest and mountain providing beautiful scenery to engage visitors. And while the majestic beauty was a nice distraction, it was Node.js and JavaScript that the attendees came to experience. And there was a bounty!
While you can see all the event videos here, we’d like to share some sessions that really stood out to us.
The first was one of the keynotes that launched the event, presented by April Wensel . Wensel is the Founder of “Compassionate Coding”, and broke down stereotypes of developers in “Programmers Don’t Like People…or Do They?” While examining the various behaviours that programmers may exhibit, she stated “I don’t believe in having role models, I believe in modeling specific behaviors that have an impact” contrasted with the alternative “Rather than worshiping an entire person who is flawed and will do toxic things as well”. Overall, the session helped us get a better understanding of how we can all make a contribution to community culture and was a great way to kick off a vibrant and diverse conference.
Speaking of community, another interesting session was at the “Community Corner,” a new addition this year featuring community talks in a more informal setting. There, IBM’s Gireesh Punathil presented “Effectively Leverage nodejs/help Repo”. It provided a run-through of best practices to utilise the nodejs/help repo with best practices. A good approach - look at what your expected outcome is and how problems may emerge with your code snippet.
We were excited to officially announce LoopBack 4 GA. Chris Bailey, IBM’s Chief Architect of Cloud Native Runtimes, told attendees that it was live in his “Create, Deploy and Scale: Building Enterprise Grade Cloud Native Node.js APIs” keynote. Later, LoopBack developer (and one of StrongLoop’s founders) Raymond Feng provided a walkthrough of LoopBack 4 in his session “The Art of Building Node.js Projects at Scale”. There was also a LoopBack 4 hands-on workshop for those who really wanted to dive deeply. Check out the lab instructions to try it yourself!
CloudNativeJS was also a hot topic, including the corresponding CloudNativeJS workshop which was a big hit with attendees. Chris Bailey shared his “Node+JS Interactive Keynote: Create, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade cloud native APIs” source materials on IBM’s DevWorks.
The IBM team was able to chat with many of the attendees at our booth. It is always encouraging to have a chance to see how people are developing with the tools we support and what suggetsions and quetsions they may have. The Loopback team received a few questions, and we will share some answers to these LoopBack-specific questions later this week.
Speaking of seeing how people develop, Wednesday’s Booth Crawl was a great opportunity to see what other people - and businesses - are doing with Node and JavaScript. Plenty of people visited the IBM booth with questions, and appetizers and drinks made the conversation go a little more smoothly.
The event officially wrapped up Thursday evening at an afterparty hosted by Telus at Vancouver’s Telus Garden. It was a great way to celebrate after a couple of solid days of learning and connecting!
What’s Next?
- Wondering what events to check out next? Check out our Events page for upcoming Node.js, API Development, and Integration Events. The StrongLoop team sponsors, speaks at, or hosts a booth at these conferences, webinars and meetups.