Contributing to the Developer Community: Sophilabs at JSConf Uruguay 2015

At sophilabs, it's important to us to be active members of the developer community by both constantly learning new things and sharing our knowledge and resources. In 2015, sophilabs co-founder Pablo Ricco created a JSConf event in Montevideo, Uruguay, which sophilabs co-organized alongside other event sponsors. It was a well-attended, successful conference, and it was exciting to hear about many of the awesome innovations happening in JavaScript.

About JSConf

JSConf is a loose federation of volunteers that guide local event organizers in putting together their own conference centered around JavaScript development. JSConf believes in "pushing the boundaries of what is thought to be conceivable with JavaScript and providing exceptional, human social activities that encourage community and friendship-building." As JSConf events are run using a "franchise" model, every JSConf has its own local feel while sharing the mission "to make the technology community better, more diverse, and more human." ¹

An Event to Remember

JSConf Uruguay 2015 was a big hit in the local developer community, featuring speakers from across Latin America as well as Europe and the US. The keynote speakers were Alex Sexton, Product Engineer at Stripe, who discussed how to create, test, and maintain a library; Jeremy Morrell, front-end engineer at Facebook, who explored "Flux in Large Applications"; developer James Halliday, who dove into how to build offline, distributed web applications; and educator and NodeSource engineer Julián Duque, who discussed io.js and the future of Node.

Other fascinating talks from the two-day conference included front-end developer Lourdes Montano's talk about working with Sass Maps; polyglot Angelina Fabbro's lecture on OSX and how to script applications; and web evangelist Martin Naumann's "To 3D and Beyond: WebGL and WebVR for Fun and Profit." There were also workshops on a diverse array of topics, including Websockets, Meteor, Ionic, Ember, Node and the Internet of Things, and WebGL and three.js.

Our key take-away from this event was the great extent to which the JavaScript community is thriving in Latin America and across the globe. Innovations in JavaScript continue to offer brilliant solutions. At sophilabs, we love facilitating human connection through exploring the boundless possibilities of our craft, and JSConf Uruguay 2015 provided the perfect opportunity to achieve that. We were even inspired to co-organize another conference the following year. We hope to see the Javascript community continue to flourish in Uruguay and around the world.