Spain.js 2013 - JavaScript Conference in Madrid

During these days I have been attending Spain.js 2013 in Madrid. For me, it has been a beautiful experience.

I was looking forward to visit Madrid, and it didn't let me down. It had been one year since I left Madrid to move to Sweden. Since then I have tried to keep in contact with some of my ex-workmates in my previous company, Tuenti, and have been following many talented Spanish developers on Twitter.

During the conference I gave a talk together with my Spotify colleague Tomás Pérez about "Cross-platform application development using web technologies". We had been planning giving a talk in Spain for some time, sharing some ideas and experience we have learned as developers in Spotify. We have little experience as speakers, but the desire of spreading our knowledge was powerful.

Unfortunately, the talk was not recorded, but you can find the slides on Github. And some extra material. Tomás has been contrasting thoroughly all the data that supported the talk, and you can find the source for the examples, links to jsPerf and other references in that repo on Github.

I loved that we got feedback about people struggling for solving similar problems to ours, and I hope that our talk helped them.

There were many interesting talks. I like those that show real cases of people trying to push the web forward, and share what they learned. Those that help you structure your code and improve your flow so you don't make the same mistakes other people made.

My favourite ones where these ones (in no particular order):

Martin Naumann (@avgp): From web apps to hybrid mobile apps - Leveraging web technologies for making "native" mobile applications Martin explained what framweworks and libraries were available for building web apps and hybrid apps. And, most importantly, what criteria you should take into account when choosing one or the other.

Jakob Mattsson (@jakobmattsson): Manage those dependencies! I met Jakob the day before the conference and he was super kind. He is super fun and has always a big smile on his face. Jakob explained in his talk different libraries for managing and loading dependencies and the criteria for deciding on one.

Tom Buchok (@tbuchok): A history: Node.js and serving billions of requests in the real world! Tom showed a real example of a system that uses node.js in production and explained some decisions they took when scaling it.

You can check out the available material for the conference on Lanyrd. If you attended the talk and know of missing resources, try to add them. It is very easy: create an account, and you are safe to make changes.

I couldn't attend the workshops, but I am definitely going to check the material that the developers that run them have posted. I could meet the organizers and the rest of speakers the evening before the event, and it was really fun.

As a teenager, my father told me not to forget who I was and my origins. I should always be humble. This talk was my way of giving back, and not forget where I was few months ago, especially now that the situation in my country is not as good as I would like. And reencountering with old friends from Tuenti and meeting lots of great and skilled developers I just knew of from tweets and posts has made me feel great.