All you need to know: Script18 #scriptconf

We at Storyblok are all developers. And if a developer conference is taking place in our hometown, you know where to find us. Last week we joined the Scriptconf in Linz, and today I want to share our thoughts, learnings, and experiences.

Section titled The Scriptconf Intro The Scriptconf Intro

Script is an independent one-day, curated and handcrafted JavaScript event for the community, happening in Linz, Austria. Join us on January 19, 2018, for a day (and night) of fun, inspiration, and education.

This conference ships with the tagline: A conference about JavaScript. And damn, yes, it's about JavaScript! Where else could you hear talks by such amazing speakers? One day starting at 12 o'clock.

• Evan You / The Journey to Full Time Open Source
• Marcy Sutton / Radically Accessible Internet Applications
• Simona Cotin / Hop on the Serverless Adventure with NodeJS
• Andre Staltz / Cycle.JS on Pen and Paper
• Michaela Lehr / Creating Augmented Reality Apps with Web Technology
• Phil Hawksworth / Next Wave Infrastructure - do Far More with Much Less
• Charlie Gerard / Look Mum No Hands

I don't want to pick or highlight one or two talks from the speakers above because all of them were unique, funny, interesting from start to end. They even got Evan You and Andre Staltz for a workshop one day before the conference. You may notice that Storyblok is made with Vue.js so we attended not only the conference but also got a seat at the workshop with Evan You (will write about that soon).

Section titled Evan You - The Journey to Full Time Open Source Evan You - The Journey to Full Time Open Source

We were impressed on how freely Evan talked about his unique journey to full-time open source. He should us some insights of the early years of Vue.js and his focus at that point. Some of you may wonder if Vue.js started with the idea of becoming one of the fastest growing JavaScript Frameworks - it wasn't. Evan told us that he started Vue.js because he was interested and curious about if he can manage to create a Framework for himself. As the talk started, Evan showed us a hype graph and his experience with it and how Vue.js followed that hype graph. You can see that by the commit history (2014) on his very own Github profile.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

Open issues with more details than needed, and before you open one:

• read the docs,
• search the web,
• ask (if it's a question) on Stackoverflow.

If you ever think of building something for a community, have in mind that it may be used by others (even in production) and therefore there will be bugs which need to be handled. If you ever will face the "problem" that your library or tool receives some attention - you may like to know about those resources and ways to monetize it:

• Patreon
• Open Collective
• Moral Licensing (Couldn't find any good resource - basically: a license a company can buy to get an invoice, which is somehow easier for them than to simply donate something),
• Build a business/product around it
• Get sponsor-hired - (no really, get hired to work on your open source project, it may work if that company relies on your tool somehow)

Section titled Marcy Sutton - Radically Accessible Internet Applications Marcy Sutton - Radically Accessible Internet Applications

Before you read this section, open your own Website and install aXe - Coconut which will not only help you to improve your own website, but also the experience for your visitors. Marcys talk was all about accessibility and showed us that it's actually sad that large or government websites are not accessible for everyone. You can find links to those in the slides next to some skiing videos (not kidding - loved it). Since you already have your website open also activate (and I assume you're in Chrome/Canary here) Google Chrome’s Color Contrast Debugger and check your website, let me know how it worked on your own site.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• Vote for inert! Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Safari Webkit
• Improve highlighting, focus states and more with What Input.
• Have a look at all resources in the slides
• Don't take your health for granted - everything can happen at any time, prepare at least your tool for that.

Section titled Simona Cotin - Hop on the serverless adventure with NodeJS Simona Cotin - Hop on the serverless adventure with NodeJS

Simona is a Software Engineer / Developer Advocate at Microsoft and showed us how you can use Microsoft Azure Functions using NodeJS to outsource functions to their cloud service. We saw some short code snippets that did a lot in the background. Maybe you're looking for a way to push a slack notification on a given event, you could do that by simply creating a function and call it as the event happens. Maybe you want to connect Storybloks Webhook to send you and your team a slack notification as soon as new content got published? Or you want to receive a message via SMS using Twilio. You can do all that with cloud functions! Give it a try.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• FaaS - Functions as a Service is something to look at
• Creating a blog post about how you can send a slack notification using Azure functions could be nice? (let me know)
• This serverless architecture could work quite well for rapid prototyping

Section titled Andre Staltz - Cycle.js on pen and paper Andre Staltz - Cycle.js on pen and paper

First things first: I guess some of you know Cycle.js already, but didn't star it on Github yet. Right? There you go Cycle.js. Andre talked and showed us how to "code" Cycle.js using pen and paper, and by that I mean: Apple Pencil and an iPad. It was really nice to see the idea of cycle.js put on a live demo without actual code, imagine a flow chart that represents your code. Together with Andre, we went from a simple DOM manipulation "hello world" style to the flowchart of MMMMM Mobile, step by step making the idea of Cycle.js much clearer to the audience.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• Check out Cycle.js
• It felt like Cycle.js apps are quite easy to understand, because the data flow is visible in the code, making it readable and traceable.
• Maybe have a look at the free egghead.io video tutorial if you got 1 hour and 37 minutes.

Section titled Michaela Lehr - Creating Augmented Reality Apps with Web Technology Michaela Lehr - Creating Augmented Reality Apps with Web Technology

Michaela brought us into another world, had to bring that line, but: This talk just was great. If you want to learn something about Augmented Reality and about "don'ts" using AR, you should definitely checkout her Github, Twitter and her presentation linked below. We also saw some existing apps that make great use of AR for businesses, one of them was a customer of ourselves: Roomle. Michaela also mentioned the hype graph and showed us the current state of AR/VR and some live coding with AR.js which focus is to bring AR for the web to reality.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• Check out the Slides
• There are free 3D objects for you to use: Poly by Google or Sketchfab
• Let's get involved: Start using and support AR.js to bring AR to the web.

Section titled Phil Hawksworth - Next wave infrastructure - do far more with much less Phil Hawksworth - Next wave infrastructure - do far more with much less

Phil Hawksworth simply nailed a project timeline. This talk was about his experiences with deployments, how you could improve your project timeline using Netlify and save hours of a headache at launch day. I have to admit, that this talk was the funniest of all of them, simply because all of us experienced one or two of the jokes brought up in their previous job. I really got motivated to test Netlify so you know how you can deploy a static website with content from Storyblok using Netlify.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• FTP should not be used for deployments. But what about... - No!
• Check out Netlify to deploy a static website
• Phil Hawksworth is an amazing standup comedian
• SFTP is also not the way to go!

Section titled Charlie Gerard - Look mum, no hands! Charlie Gerard - Look mum, no hands!

First of all: Charlie flew all the way from Sydney to Linz?! Thanks for that! This talk was all about mind control in JavaScript. All the way from actually learning to code as a former digital producer, first experiences with Leap Motion, Sphero and Drones. Going one step further by using Emotiv and finally creating her own library to access the C++ SDKs by Emotiv to work with NodeJS. We loved every bit of it.

Section titled Learnings Learnings

• Checkout her slides
• The Epoc.js Library for Emotiv
• How to build your own NodeJS library above a C++ SDK using Node-gyp, Nan and Node-Bindings

Section titled The DJ: baldower - Tobi Lessnow The DJ: baldower - Tobi Lessnow

I guess everybody at Scriptconf loved you, including us. Tobi not only made music live on stage, dancing like there is no tomorrow and got everybody to smile - No! Tobi sampled every talk immediately into his music and made it a unique experience. If you're reading this: Thank you! For everybody else: If you want to make your own conference special - Tobi is your man for that job.

• "Sexy CMS train" - Phil Hawksworth
• "Unique Experience" - André Staltz
• "Every conference should do this" - Simona Cotin
• "Killing it on the decks" - Manuel Matuzović
• Follow him on Twitter!

Section titled The overall experience The overall experience

If you've read the above you may already know that Scriptconf was a unique experience. Starting with interesting talks, top location, astoundingly well-prepared team - overcoming obstacles along the way, and amazing people everywhere. If you had no time this year or maybe you were too late for tickets, make sure to get yourself tickets for Script19. If it only will be like 10% of the Script18 it is worth every penny. We had everything: Tasty snacks, self-made beer (HTMAle and LagerScript), Live DJs, #scriptconf trending on #1 in Austria and a toddler on Stage and another one in the back. Overall: One of the best conferences 2018 will have.