JSConf.eu

Yup, that's the back of my neck.

Last weekend Dietrich, Matteo and I were fortunate enough to be able to tack a trip to Berlin on to the end of out trip to Merry Old London to attend JSConf.eu. I've been to many conferences ( and even helped produce a few? ) and was totally impressed by JSConf, on a number of levels:

• Room for rockstars and local speakers ( some speakers of course fall into both groups ). The main room at JSConf was very large, to the extent that it would freak me out doing a talk there. It was good to see that the upstairs room was both cozier and the talks more diverse than the main room.
• Levity! The conference opened with a charming girl named Mandy singing Brendan Eich a hilarious song. Mid-afternoon on day 1 there was a coding competition where the loser for each question had to drink booze mixed by robots.
• Proper caffeination thanks to Espresso Ambulanz, a key success factor for the North Americans fighting off both jet lag and the ill effects of the party the night before.
• Fantastic illustrations. I wasn't able to get all of them, but here are a few.

The weekend for me was a mixture of attending talks, talking to people about Firefox, demoing mobile nightly builds, helping Olle install a Nightly build on his Galaxy S, and fielding all sorts of SDK questions from how to use Websockets, to AMO review queue gripes. That doesn't necessarily sound like loads of fun, but it was, and it was a great reminder of how awesome community-driven events like this can be.

The single greatest moment for me happened during Christian Heillmann's talk on Sunday where right at the end, he showed the packed house some demos of upcoming features in Firefox's dev tools. I'm not exaggerating when I say that people were blown away. The crowd reaction was huge!