The ubiquity of JavaScript is undeniable; it’s the universal language of the web — a position that no other languages hold. JavaScript is flexible, able to adapt and grow as the web grows.

HalfStack is a series of tech conferences focused on half of the web development stack – specifically, the part you interface with. It lives up to its claims of being “an authentic, high value experience for attendees and sponsors focused on UI-centric JavaScript and web development.” Friday, January 17, 2020 Alamo Drafthouse, Chandler, Arizona The morning got off to a great start with comfortable seating and fine dining at the Alamo Drafthouse in Chandler.

As a first-time JSConf attendee, I happily embraced the welcoming culture and fun atmosphere – surfing, anyone? But I was even more impacted by the presentations centered around JavaScript expanding beyond the browser, using JavaScript to help others, and the focus on community. Of course I’m an avid JavaScript engineer and believer (why else would I be at JSConf), but I left feeling awed and inspired after seeing how progressive and impactful the JavaScript ecosystem can be.

Esri provides the excellent ArcGIS for JavaScript API for building geospatial applications. Their approach has grown substantially over the years, from basic two-dimensional maps comparable to early Google Maps implementations to now cover nearly everything I can imagine wanting to do in a 2-D or 3-D map.

SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup.

Last Thursday I was lucky enough to get over to the highly regarded web development conference ffconf in Brighton. This was my first time at the event and I can say that it lived up to and even exceeded my expectations.

Every year, Esri, the world’s largest geospatial software vendor, runs its developer summit in Europe. This conference, the Esri EU DevSummit, attracts around 350 developers working with Esri technology from across Europe, all coalescing in Berlin.

All Things Open is a large, community-created open source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, with nearly 4,000 attendees and 20 concurrent sessions. At this year’s event, I was invited to deliver a talk similar to one I had presented at JSConf titled “React Already Did That.” The session itself is not actually about React, but about several key concepts in how the JavaScript ecosystem evolves.

The 2018 edition of the Node+JS Interactive conference featured nearly 1,000 JavaScript and Node.js enthusiasts at the first combined event organized by the Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation. The event included nearly 100 sessions, panels, and community events designed to help grow and foster the JavaScript ecosystem.

At this months’s FullStack London 2018, SitePen Engineer James Milner presented the talk “Improving User Experience With Web Workers”. Web browsers use single-threaded JavaScript to perform tasks; business logic, layout, reflows, and garbage collection.

At this month’s FullStack London 2018, our CEO, Dylan Schiemann, presented the talk “Choosing a Framework”, based on our Choosing a Framework blog series. Given our long history in web development, we’ve seen JavaScript evolve from an obscure simplistic scripting language to the language of the internet.

Picture lots and lots of dogs wearing vests Now, are you thinking of a Lewis Carroll-esque canine tea party, or a collection of service dogs? If the latter, you may be ready to attend the thankfully-abbreviated California State University: Northridge Assistive Technology Conference (hereafter referred to as CSUN or #CSUNATC18). If you picture an impeccably-dressed doggy social occasion, you would also be ready to attend CSUN.

At the recent NEJSConf, SitePen engineer Sarah Higley delivered a talk titled Don’t forget your keys. People tend to assume everyone navigates the world in the same way they do: on two legs, responding to visual cues, hearing speech, reading emotion.

In case you missed it, SitePen was the presenting sponsor of the inaugural TSConf which took place in Seattle on March 12, 2018! The Backstory In 2017, we met the TypeScript team in person after years of being avid members and contributors to the TypeScript project. We asked them when the first TypeScript conference would be and they answered with: “Do you want to do it?” SitePen, along with various members of its team, has organized community meetups, sponsored conferences and have, of course, been speakers at many events, but this was the first time we had ever considered tackling an entire conference from start to finish.

Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were expecting a well organised and interesting conference, and we were not to be disappointed.

Now in its 7th year, Web Summit is the world’s largest web conference, with more than 50,000 people in attendance. The conference possibly draws inspiration from SXSW Interactive, with a European twist.

SafetyNet is an annual conference hosted by Pulsiam and is focused on trends in software for the safety industry. Because of our expertise in shaping the modern web and our ongoing work with Pulsiam’s application development efforts, I was invited to deliver a keynote about the past, present, and future of the web, as this industry begins to transition to web-based solutions.

A quintessential British tradition is the pub quiz, a test of a group’s knowledge of obscure facts and trivia, typically shared over dinner and drinks at a pub. In the era of the smart phone, pub quizzes have needed to implement strict no phone policies to make sure people are answering from their knowledge rather than their computer.

FullStack is a large London JavaScript conference hosted at the Skills Matter CodeNode. The conference brings together an impressive line-up of speakers and workshops covering five tracks over three full days of festivities.

Day 2 of the Lead Developer Conference continued with a series of excellent talks. Be sure to check out the Day 1 recap if you missed it.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Lead Developer Conference, a two-day, single-track conference with over 400 development leads from the UK, Europe, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The event included an excellent array of speakers representing development leads at companies including Slack, Atlassian, ThoughtWorks, Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Shopify, Couchbase, and many other organizations.

QCon Beijing happened last week and I had the opportunity to travel and give a talk as one of the few American speakers. Most notably, all talks were delivered in Mandarin which was a bit of a challenge given that I don’t speak Mandarin.

I attended the Microsoft Edge Web Summit in San Francisco. I will be honest, outside of meeting a few people, I wasn’t expecting much.

Esri, the creators of great mapping technology, hosts their DevSummit every March in Palm Springs, CA. Esri creates their popular ArcGIS for JavaScript API by leveraging the Dojo Toolkit.

Last weekend at the Omni resort on Amelia Island, FL, the last JSConf US took place. The Williams family is no longer able to run this conference, so with much sadness it will not be continuing in its current form.

Picture this: 100+ developers and their phones and laptops making crashing noises playing a live-created clone of Flappy Bird. Now picture the same devices working together to create a live MIDI concert, followed by a challenging and fun JavaScript pub quiz.

I recently attended Nodevember, a two-day JavaScript conference down in Nashville, TN. My love for JavaScript motivated me to take my attendance a step further and volunteer.

I had the opportunity to speak and attend FullStack 2015 organised by Skills Matter and hosted at their CodeNode location in central London. It was a great experience and it’s clear that JavaScript is everywhere and permeating every aspect of technology today! It was no surprise that ES6/ES2015 and TypeScript were popping up in every conversation.

I was recently invited to attend the Twitter Flight conference in San Francisco! While this conference is clearly focused around Twitter products, this year included mobile and data tracks which covered the Fabric mobile SDK and the GNIP enterprise API platform. Overall they did an amazing job creating the conference, giving me a great opportunity to meet new people and attend some engaging talks.

In October, 2014, I was coerced invited to deliver a talk at the first FullStack conference in London, a conference focused on Node.js, JavaScript and hackable electronics. The conference was an interesting cross-section of all things related to JavaScript.

At many conferences, the hallway track is more interesting than the track during presentations. It’s the serendipity of a small group of people interested in solving a similar problem that run into each other and just start talking through it that makes the hallway track the most interactive experience at most conferences.

Over the last few weeks, Dylan has given talks across the western United States and Europe and we’ve tracked his every move on our blog. Dylan will finish his trip with stops in Tempe, AZ and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Continuing on his road trip, Dylan presented AMD in Depth at the London Ajax User Group meeting on April 10th.   Over 80 optimistic and energetic developers attended the engaging presentation. Want to learn more about AMD?  Check out the presentation on our SlideShare page.

The 2012 ESRI Developer Summit is attended by 1,700 developers, half are attending for the first time and thirty percent are from international locations! Dylan continues to mingle with like-minded Dojo enthusiasts from around the world, including people from the US, Canada, UAE, Japan, England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands!  The conversations at ESRI Dev Summit are confirming what we already know – Dojo is worldwide! Yesterday, Dylan presented Top Ways Dojo Can Improve Your Mapping App to a standing room only crowd!  Using an iPad, iPhone and MacBook Pro to present the talk and demo, Dylan was able to accurately showcase the cross-platform open web capabilities of Dojo.   We’ve posted the presentation and encourage you to take a look. SitePen will answer any questions you have about Dojo and mapping.  Contact us to learn more.

Dylan arrived in Palm Springs on Saturday with hundreds of other ESRI Partners just in time to participate in the Jim Christoffersen Golf Classic.  The four-player shamble event took place on the south course at the Indian Canyons Golf Resort.  Dylan had the honor of golfing with the founder of ESRI Japan, Chiharu Masaki, and meeting many ESRI partners from around the world.  The five hour event was enjoyed in the almost perfect Palm Springs weather, and Dylan reports that his golf game “wasn’t that bad”.

SitePen’s Dylan Schiemann delivered the last of his three Rich Web Experience 2011 presentations yesterday, Never Bet Against the Open Web. Dylan had this to say about his time at #RWX2011: The level of interest in AMD, object stores, and mobile is impressive.

Featured as one of three sessions to see on Monday’s web track at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference in San Francisco this week, SitePen’s CEO Dylan Schiemann presented Make Beautiful Apps Faster Using the Dojo Mobile Toolkit.  His session talked about creating superior experiences using standard open web technologies and presented an overview of the Dojo Toolkit, HTML5 and mobile-specific features and new Dojo APIs that fundamentally change web application development for the better.

If you’re attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London in early October, be sure to introduce yourself. I’m excited to learn the results of the 2009 Web Application survey.

I gave a talk on Dojo Wednesday at ZendCon, and when I walked into the room for the talk, there was some disorder as the conference center staff were taking out the tables to fit more chairs in. Even with the extra space, the room was totally packed, thanks in large part to the amazing Dojo integration work that the Zend team has done.

SitePen was in the news recently: Simplexity Rising: Web usability reveals itself to be a game of hide-and-seek covers our session, “Your Mom, 2.0”, for the upcoming SXSW 2008, and offers some choice quotes about building web apps that are feature rich yet easy to use. At this session, we’ll be discussing the things that make an app that’s easy for Mom to use but still delivers the features everyone wants to use.

I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations.

I recently had the opportunity to speak about Dojo on the iPhone at AjaxWorld West. The session was a straightforward, if not colorful, review of the current state of app development for the iPhone.

With the recent launch of Dojo 0.9 and the planned launch of 1.0 in late October, the SitePen Dojo training courses have been revamped and now focus exclusively on the new code base. SitePen’s partnership with UK-based Skills Matter is allowing us to offer our 3-day Dojo training workshop overseas, several times, in the upcoming months.

Slides from our recent talks at the Ajax Experience and the Rich Web Experience are now available. Newly added talks include: Standards Heresy: Dojo and the Rise of Open Web Pragmatism Dojo 0.9: Faster, Leaner, and Dijit? Comet: Low Latency Data Transit or Really Bad Pun?.

Last week was the latest installment of the Ajax Experience in San Francisco. More low-key than last year’s conference, I left the main corridor only to give two talks, one on Dojo and one on Comet.

We’re speaking at and/or attending a number of upcoming events and conferences. We hope to see you there! May 20-23: Alex will be attending the IEEE Privacy and Security Symposium in Oakland, CA.

At SXSW and AjaxWorld, I had the opportunity to talk about dojo.gfx and native web vector graphics in general. The amazing thing about these talks was the large number of attendees familiar with and interested in SVG, Canvas, and other native vector graphics formats.

The Ajax Experience is this Monday October 23 through Wednesday October 25 in Boston. If it is anything like the one in San Francisco in May, it is going to be a great show.We are giving four talks at the conference.

“Mobile Ajax” is a code word for “snake oil” and the folks who claim it’s the future probably aren’t working with it.

I’ll be at LinuxWorld this week, and I’ll even be giving a talk on Thursday. If you’re going to be at the conference and want to catch up, just send mail to alex at sitepen dot com..