The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - JavaScript in the Wild at NEJS Conf (Interview)

Episode Date: July 25, 2015

Jerod Santo took off his host hat this show and joined Zach Leatherman, and Nick Nisi, his co-organizers of NEJS Conf to talk about JavaScript in the wild in Omaha, Nebraska.

Welcome back everyone, this is the Change Log and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 166 and on today's show we got an awesome show about JavaScript. JavaScript in the wild as a matter of fact. We're talking to three of six of the awesome organizers behind NEJSConf 2015, happening August 7th in Omaha, Nebraska. Today we're talking to Zach Leatherman, Nick Nisi, and also co-host of the show, Jared Santa, who is doubling as an organizer of this awesome conference. We have three awesome sponsors for this show, CodeShip, TopTile, and HipChat.

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all right we're back we got a great show lined up today it's all about javascript today as a matter of fact it's not just javascript it's j JavaScript in the wild. We have three of six of the organizers making any JSConf 2015 happen. So we got Jared on the line. We got Nick on the line. And we got Zach on the line. Everybody say hello. Hello. Hey, how's it going?

Alright, so who's excited about this conference? Woo! Everybody. Yeah. I think we're all excited. I think that we're all nervous. We're kind of going into the last couple of weeks here, so everything's kind of starting to come together. I'm glad you mentioned that. So today's record day is July 21st.

The release date, so the air date, is planned to be July 24th. And the conference, so everybody's listening and potentially clicking a button to go buy a ticket if there's some left um is august 7th it's friday um so we got what roughly 150 people 200 people coming is it fully sold out yet what's this what's the what's the state i think we got about 30 or 40 tickets left so if people want to get on board, they got to buy their tickets soon. Okay. So just to start this show off right, let's get to know everybody here. So everybody knows Jared, right?

Jared, you're known. You're normal. I don't know if I'm normal, but I'm normally on the show. You're normally on this show. People know who you are. So Jared Santo, you live in Omaha, Nebraska Correct You work with these fellas here and some others on organizing this conference

You want to give an intro to yourself for those who may not know who you are? Who, me? Yeah, you Yeah, Jared Santo, I live in Omaha, Nebraska Helping organize this conference Co-host of the ChangeLog That's right What else do you want to know adam object lateral yeah

so i'm a software developer uh on contract object lateral is my company i also do some teaching at web dev boot camp called interface school um for kids a wife see nobody knows this about you on this show i get to talk about your your details too often yeah those are your details i feel strange the the light has is you know uh shining on me now i don't like this the veil just being pulled back a little tiny bit and the i prefer to ask the questions i prefer to ask the questions all these jared santo secrets are being exposed let's well let's we'll leave you alone for a bit then. Zach, how about you? Zach Leatherman, by the way. I'm Zach Leatherman. I also live in Omaha.

I am one of the co-organizers of NebraskaJS, one of six organizers for the conference. I work for Filament Group, which is a small design and development consultancy in Boston. I think that's about it. What is NebraskaJS? NebraskaJS is the meetup from which the NebraskaJS conference was born from. So NebraskaJS started as a meetup, I think in 2009, and it kind of fizzled out in 2012. And that's when I kind of took over from three people that were kind of looking to get rid of it. And we made a couple changes to it. Started publishing all the talks and meetup videos online. Getting a bunch of different speakers to come in and just kind of grew the meetup from that.

Zach's also a frequent conference attendee and speaker. He's spoken at Smashing Conf, Velocity, CSS Conf. He even spoke at the White House recently. What? Are you kidding me? He's being humble, but I won't be humble for him. Come on. Tell us about that.

Oh, yeah. So they invited a bunch of meetup organizers to go to the White House to speak, um, and just kind of highlight people that were doing things to get people involved with technology in their communities. So I was probably the most underqualified person there. Uh, but there were just, there was a ton of very talented and very amazing people doing, uh doing crazy things in their development communities to get people involved with technology. So people that were doing code schools, people that were trying to help people get out of poverty by learning to code,

and humble meetup organizers like myself. Well, you did revive it, though. You said it was dying in 2012. You took it over, and now I'm sure it's blossoming because you've got a conference coming from it. Yeah, that was kind of one of the big goals that I had when I took it over. That was kind of one of the long-term goals that we wanted to do. And now it's finally happening. So, yeah, I'm really excited about it.

And silent so far is Nick Nisi. So Nick, you're a software engineer at SitePen. Yes. Intro this awesome audience to yourself. I want to hear more about Jared. I said I want to hear more about Jared, actually. No. I'm a software developer at SitePen.

I work remotely. It's a 100% remote development consulting team, mostly doing JavaScript and TypeScript these days. And I'm also a co-organizer of NebraskaJS and of the NEJSConf or NebraskaJSConf. Anybody else on your team, guys, that you want to give a shout out to that's not present here? Definitely. Yeah, we have

Matt Steele, who works for Union Pacific. He's one of our organizers. We have Sandy Barr. And we also have John Hobbs. Very cool. And so you got six people this year putting on the very first version of this conference.

So this is August 7th. So it's not very far away. The change law will be there. We're shooting our fourth season of Beyond Code there. We'll also be shooting some video for the for the actual conference itself and just kind of being a part of the mix there. But as a first time conference, what what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced or some of the biggest things you were most excited about actually doing this conference being its first time? We kind of had no idea what we were doing starting out. That's usually the case, isn't it? Yeah. So everybody was in over their heads?

I mean, or has someone had some experience doing this stuff? Well, I mean, it just kind of started from the meetup, I think. Actually, the original idea probably came from JSConf in Florida. A couple of us went down there to the JavaScript conference. They had an Amelia Island. It's a pretty big JavaScript conference. And Chris Williams, the organizer down there, really encouraged people to sort of start things in their own development communities and get things growing from grassroots, I think, to try and probably get more tickets sold for the big JSConf there. So, yeah, I think it was just kind of born out of an idea, just kind of sitting around drinking on the beach at Amelia Island at a resort.

We're like, hey, we could do something like this, having no idea what we're really getting ourselves into. But a couple of years after that, we finally decided to pull the trigger and organize it. I think you've done pretty well here so far with your first time. I've never been to a conference that's been at a zoo, which does sort of lean towards the subtitle, which is JavaScript in the wild. So, I mean,

why, why is it? It's the Henry Dorley zoo and aquarium there in Omaha. And Jared, you've talked about this a couple of times too, on a private side, just, you know,

when we're talking about this conference. What's unique about the zoo? Well, I mean in Omaha, there's not too much to do. We probably have a worse reputation. Nebraska has a more boring and yawny reputation than perhaps it deserves. Maybe it's accurate. But Omaha is a decent-sized metropolitan, and there's actually kind of a burgeoning creative and technology scene, even a small startup scene here in Omaha and in the Midwest.

But we really wanted to highlight one of Omaha's main attractions and have something that's different than a lot of conferences that you typically go to. So the Henry Dorley Zoo is huge. It's one of the best zoos in the world. And Back Trip Advisor calls it America's number one zoo or the world's number one zoo. The world's. I think it's the world's number one zoo.

Wow. So take that, world. It has the largest cat complex, indoor jungle, indoor desert, and I think that's it. and also largest aquarium that's also attached to a zoo for a long time we played second fiddle to san diego i think just because they had raw square footage over us um but sometimes at some point in the last couple years we've taken we've overtaken them and are now number one um so yeah it just seemed like a really cool unique place to have a conference about JavaScript Will we see any animals by any chance?

Yeah absolutely we're going to have some live animal demos, animals roaming around The play code Yeah we're going to have some zookeepers come in and bring in show some animals around in in the conference venue so it should be pretty unique pretty cool cool and also the the conference venue itself is a conference center that's attached to the aquarium and includes a 24 foot 10 000 gallon reef uh aquarium so there will be a lot of fish in there as well oh we love fish fisher fisher very welcome

here on the changelog speaking of fish we have a single track conference so this is a single day single track small group so i guess being born from a meetup it would make sense to start out you know in the smaller scale so i think some of my favorite conferences to go to are 200 people or less because they just feel a little more intimate. But coming off the heels of GopherCon, I also enjoy 12 to 1500. It just kind of depends on what place you're doing it in. So being that it's this first year, what were some of the things that you focused on as, I guess, from a speaker standpoint and also just making everyone feel comfortable?

I mean, conferences are a lot of work. So what was the focus initially placed on when setting it up? Well, I think we wanted to keep it, or I wanted to keep it single track just to make it simpler logistically. It simplifies things a lot for the organizers, but I also really enjoy single track conferences more. Um, because I, you always get that fear of missing out when you have a multiple track

conference. Um, you don't know what's going on in the other track or you don't know what you're missing. Um, and we really want to minimize the number of decisions that attendees have to make. We don't want to have people have to choose between talks. And I think it, I don't know, I just like it a lot better. I just like single track a lot better. I don't know if Nick, do you have an opinion on that?

Yeah, I think basically it's a lot simpler to to do that with the it works out well at the venue to have just a single speaker at a time um at least for this this first one and being our first conference like i've been to some multi-track conferences and it just it seems like it's a lot more work to make sure that everything's coordinated and everything's synchronized and and so it just seemed like a lot easier of a place to start. And it also gives us the opportunity to highlight all of the speakers that we're inviting to come in. And we've got speakers coming in from all over the world and even a couple of local speakers to kind of highlight the local talent that we have as well. Yeah, I think that's a good point, Nick, because one of the reasons that we wanted to do a

conference and the reason that we do the meetup is that we're trying to expose more local developers to the community. And I think a single track helps do that as well. People that are kind of not quite as well known can get a little bit better exposure with a single track conference. Do you guys know the ratio of local speakers to out-of-towners? Yeah, I think we have three local speakers out of nine. What was the process like, I guess, to, you know, one, obviously it's a single track,

so it's got to be, you know, the topics have got's a single track, so it's gotta be, you know, the topics have got to be enough closer to like a middle barrier where it's not too new, but it's not too senior. And then you're sort of in the middle there. What was the process like coming up with some topics, you know, the call for proposal, what was the selection like and actually choosing some of the speakers? I think the, I mean, the talk selection process was

pretty grueling yeah it was like we spent the whole night at the bar I don't know maybe you're seeing an organizing theme here but fighting over what talks we wanted and it got a little

I want to say it got a little dirty. Did it really? Some politics came up. Anybody get any beer tossed? No, it'll stick. Well, we don't want to, yeah, we don't want to go that extreme. We don't want to waste any of the liquids,

but yeah. Well, I think we did have a bent and this is something that Zach promotes heavily at the meetup, which is practicality. So the NebraskaJS meetup tries to highlight topics and speakers who are using JavaScript in a practical, real-world, take-it-home-and- and use it kind of way. And so even the subtitle JavaScript in the wild is kind of a play on words because it's of course in the zoo, but it's also like

these are things you can actually take. These are things JavaScript is doing out there every day running websites and businesses and these things. And so we wanted to balance that with also fun and enjoyable and interesting things. Speaker selection was difficult because we care about the we wanted to balance that with also fun and like enjoyable and interesting things. And so, um,

speaker selection was difficult because, you know, we care about the speakers and we also care that these topics kind of like played into that ballpark. And so that's where a lot of the rub kind of focused. Are these titles, uh, in stone that are on site?

Cause I wasn't reading a couple off if y'all don't mind. Yeah, I think so. Uh, yeah. So we got, uh, somebody helped me with some names. think it's uh i'm gonna say selly pam selly is that right believe in streams i think it's pam sell sell all right the e may be silent uh isaac murchie you and the temporal dead zone es6 variables for fun and profit uh i'll just read

the titles from here on out because i might put some names and offend people but add a tool to your development suite's army knife using custom elements today architecting communities is the next one svg animation with snap svg high performance in the critical rendering path which i think we've talked about recently jared a little bit here on the show and then also reacting to the isomorphic buzz. I'm assuming that's a play on words, too, because React's got to be in there somewhere. Yep. Right?

That's right. More play on words, more fun from Bruce. Good job, Bruce. So, I mean, was it a real fight when it came to choosing some of these speakers and some of the talks we just talked over? I really think so. I think we had 78 total submissions. Wow. And, I mean, we only had seven speaker slots and then two keynote slots.

And so we had to whittle it down from that. And it was really, really hard. So we all kind of looked at the submissions kind of on our own and started to prioritize the ones that we really liked all of them were really fantastic so it was really hard to do that but then we came together and shared our lists with each other found the ones that were a common theme across all of the organizers and then kind of got got a first pass with maybe one or two. And then the rest of the night was just arguing about the other ones, reprioritizing the list and going on and on. So what's the total people count and total hour count gone into making the selections?

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, when it came down to doing the final talk discussion, we decided to limit that to only one night because we could have done that for weeks and weeks and weeks, I'm sure. But I mean, I think we spent probably a good solid week on individual talk selection and then group selection as well. So. What were some of the things that when you were discussing the talks and topics and was it, what were some of the things you could do? I remember Jared,

I'm thinking back to the show we had with Sarah May when she said that they purposefully hid people's names and genders and things like that so they wouldn't be biased against it. What was some of the process y'all used to sort of have an unbiased opinion towards your selections? Yeah, I definitely did that. I hid it, looked at just the titles and the descriptions of the talks to begin with, and that's kind of how I started with my side of the list. And then from there I started looking at, um,

you know, I, I got my list from there on the things that I thought were most interesting. And then I started thinking about things like, you know, wanting to have a good mix of local, um, local developers and,

and more known developers as well. And so it kind of went from there. And tech talks versus, uh from there. Tech talks versus more soft skills talks. Yeah, good point. Is there any talk here, even just maybe not a person named, but just the

topic or title named that one of you guys fought over hardcore and didn't make the cut for whatever reason? That's a good question. I don't really remember the talks that we didn't make the cut for whatever reason? That's a good question. I don't really remember the talks that we didn't select because that process, I think, took place, I don't know, I want to say like a couple months ago. Okay.

Any that you're really excited about then that's in the list? Yeah, I mean, I think all of them are going to be great. I think that Nicholas Vakwa's talk on high performance and the critical rendering path is one of the ones that I really kind of pushed hard for because I think it's a very important topic, especially with the number of sort of client-side MVC frameworks that are kind of slowing down the critical performance aspect of websites today.

Yeah, I'm excited for that one as well. I think I wasn't aware of Nicholas of Aqua prior to that. I think he submitted like, was he the guy that submitted like four or five? He just had talks. Was that him? Yeah, I think he had at least three, and he was just throwing them in there, which is like, okay. This person's excited. Somehow he found our CFP before we even publicized it. I don't know how that happened.

They're not usually hard to find. Is it slash CFP? Yeah. There you go. He's probably got a JavaScript bot just out there submitting his talks to all these conferences. Here's a life hack right there conferences here's a couple here's a couple of tips that i could give to

people who are submitting cfps and like hoping to get selected just as people who have recently done this um and these are these should be they shouldn't be had to be said but i guess they do because we ran into this over and over so the first thing you need to do is spell your talk title correctly. If you misspell your title, you're not giving yourself much of a chance to get selected. Then to proofread your synopsis, have somebody else read it for you. Read it out loud.

Make sure that the sentences make sense. Because there's a lot of competition out there and even if your conceit is really good it's hard even as a person who's like i i think there was one that was had some bad grammar that i was like rooting for and i was arguing for and i just couldn't get over the hurdle of yeah but they did not take the time to to make sure their words are spelled correctly in their synopsis, and so we can't trust them as a speaker. So those are just a couple of tips, which sound like common sense, but apparently not,

for people who are submitting proposals to CFPs. And then that's an awesome tip is go to whatever the conference is slash CFP and see if you can get in early and bombard us with multiple submissions because yeah he he was immediately on our radar because he had three talks in there before anybody did it's like wow this guy's serious um so anyways just a few a few small tips that i couldn't believe we ran into so many um almost lazy submissions. And how even though on a few of those they seem like great talk ideas, they just couldn't get over the hurdle of slow down, take the time, do it right. Yeah.

Any other thoughts, Zach or Nick, on any feedback to those out there listening and thinking, man, I want to submit a talk to a conference sometime soon or I've done it and I've never gotten selected, some feedback or some tips? Yeah, I would say get involved with the organizers. I would have been happy to review any number of submissions before the deadline went, but I never heard anything. No one asked me any questions. And I think we put on the website even, hey, we'll help you with your submission if you want our feedback up front. And, yeah, I think that can help quite a bit. Just to even refine your ideas with them before you even put in a submission I think could help your chances quite a bit. Another big piece to any conferences is obviously sponsors and what equates to cash

flow, really. So, I mean, it seems like, and Jared, only because you and I have talked outside of this, I've kind of been following a little bit of what's going on here, but it seems like as a first-time conference, you've got some sort of trick up your sleeve or something like that, because you're doing okay on you know finances from what i can tell in terms of your your home page you got plenty of sponsors so what was it like going out and seeking out either local or you know industry known sponsors what was the process like and who was in charge of that yeah i think that was kind of a team effort between me and nick. Nick is a lot better at emailing than I am. So for sure, he took the reins on a lot of the sponsor context. But I think running the meetup really was the biggest thing. We were

already exposed to a lot of companies in our community because their developers were attending our meetup. And we've been going strong for over three years now when I took over. So everyone kind of knew about the meetup already. And because we sort of transitioned from meetup to conference, there was a very clear line between the two. And people are excited to get involved. And we've actually had companies kind of fight over us to provide us with venues for the meetup or to provide us with food. I mean, we've never companies is, I think, kind of a unique thing in Omaha, just because there isn't a ton of, I want to say bigger development communities in our area.

We've had a lot of meetups, but I think they kind of I don't want to say come and go, but they haven't really united different development aspects like JavaScript can. Sort of everyone is exposed to JavaScript in some way. So that's also helped us grow the meetup, too. We have a lot of support coming out of that, just as Zach said. And it was really when we were going to get sponsors and we actually had more pressure to get an information document out about sponsoring because we had sponsors just lining up immediately that wanted to contribute.

They wanted to help out. They wanted to make sure that this conference sees the light of day. And we really couldn't do it without them. So it's been really great. What are some of the biggest questions you guys can think of when it comes to a sponsor and asking questions back to the conference? What are their biggest concerns? What are their biggest questions that took you time to get over or just get questions back to get them to commit to the support or even lack of support? We did have a little bit of a problem with a sponsor that I won't name.

But, yeah, they kind of promised us some funds and then went dark. So we never really heard back from them. And we had kind of made some decisions monetarily based on assumption of those funds. And we're going to be fine monetarily, but certainly that didn't help the conference that we kind of had that check sort of disappear out from under us. Right. I just wonder,

because, you know, a lot of the, you always have levels. So I'm assuming you had levels. I was thinking about typical levels is like, you know, premium gold,

platinum, you know, pick your metallic material and then, and then, you know, apply the level to it or whatever. But I'm wondering. Yeah, we actually did animals. Oh, you did?

Yeah. So top level was lion, I'm assuming? Elephant. Elephant. There you go. That makes sense. What we do is we pick a metaphor and then we just beat it into the ground. Right, right, right. This whole animal thing, we're just going to kill it until it's dead and then we're going to bring it back and kill it some more.

Any whales? Because I like whales. I thought that was a little too on the nose you know and when it comes to like big things and money you know you hear man i got a whale on the line here elephant that's kind of why we picked elephants the elephant in the room okay gotcha yeah i'm just wondering about the the process there because i know that um you know even for this show right it's a sponsored show so we get questions all the time about you know the the podcast and what it's about and you know all these different things so i'm just wondering like when a sponsor comes to a conference or a conference goes to a sponsor and says hey we'd like to see your support in this conference because of this, this, or this, you know, what are some of the things that are, like, getting them involved or

seeking you to them? Is it purely a financial benefit or is it, like, they're getting involved in the community, they're already there? A lot of them are already there. They're already sponsoring us, helping us out, or at least trying to, you know, because we can only have so many venues that we can host it at each month and things like that. But also, you know, looking like one of the biggest questions that I got when communicating with sponsors was kind of not in like specific detail, but like, what are you going to use the money for? How is it going to go to helping the conference? And, you know, if you have money left over, what are you going to do with it?

Things like that. And, and really just making sure that their investment is going into the community. And it really is, it's either going into this conference or feeding back into the, the meetup that we have every month or going into immediate planning for next year's conference. Should we decide to do that? So just to be clear, this isn't a get rich quick scheme. No.

Right. It's the worst one ever. It's the worst one ever. Get rich never. So that makes some perfect sense. You know, what are you using the money for? And you know,

will you give some of it back if there's some leftover? Did anybody ask you that one no one asked me that one no no they just wanted to make sure that we weren't doing it as a profit gotcha yeah that seems to be the case we're going to take a break here in a second because i got a couple things i want to bring up on that no but we got to break first and come back because we have awesome sponsors who make this show possible and we need to feature them so let's take a quick break we'll do that and we'll come back and talk a bit more about why the conference exists and uh you know what we can expect for it uh from it in the future so let's

take a break you've heard me talk about top towel several times in this podcast but today is different i've got a special treat for you i went out and spoke with a listener who a year ago had never heard of top towel he listened to the show just like you're doing right here right now today and heard us talk about top towel and what they're all about and he decided to get in touch and now he's living the dream as a freelance software developer with top towel his name is daniel elzan and I sat down and I talked with him. I said, hey, what is it that you love most about TopTile? Take a listen.

Well, for me, the thing about TopTile, which I thought would be very hard for me personally as I transitioned to a more consulting role, was the way I would have access to new clients and what quality those would be. So I found that I've had access to awesome clients through TopTal. And it hasn't been that hard to find because they have a lot of choice. And even more than that, there's enough choice and I can actually be a little selective about what kinds of things I want to be working on. So I use that as a way to sort of hone my skills and, you know, go towards the technology that I think are worth investing in for the future. So whether it's, you know, including new front end frameworks or doing a little DevOps work on the side, I usually

am able to find clients who are have the needs of the things I want to get better at. So that's been that's been truly useful. All right, that was Daniel LaZon, a listener of The Change Log and also a freelance software developer with TopTile. If you want to follow in Daniel's footsteps, go to toptile.com slash developers. That's T-O-P-T-A-L dot com slash developers

to learn more about what TopTile house all about and tell them the change log sent you well let's talk about why this conference exists i know that it's its first year obviously it's a single track we're looking at you know roughly 100 150 to 200 people uh attending uh we know it's at a zoo and we're playing the animal animal puns to the end, and we won't stop ever. No. So why – what made this – why finally this year? Why finally 2015? Why did it take so long, and why does it exist?

So that is a very good question, why it's happening this year. I think that the final impetus kind of came out of Jared's goading me into it because I had promised. So we had a meetup, I want to say probably a year and a half or two years ago, where we announced to everyone that one of our stretch goals or one of our big goals for the meetup was to do a conference eventually. And so that was kind of on everyone's mind that that was going to be something we were going to do. But it just kind of sat there. Nothing ever happened. And I think it was Jared that finally said, hey, are we going to do this conference ever?

Is this going to happen? And I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. Jared's goading us into organizing. I'm actually laughing behind the scenes here, too, and I'm trying not to put it on air, because that's how a lot of things get started right here at the Cheney's Law, too. I'm like, I tell Jared these ideas, and he gets excited about the ideas, and then it's like, well, are we ever going to do these fun ideas, Adam?

Yeah. And I'm like, I suppose, sure, let's do it. And we do it. about the ideas and then it's like well are we ever gonna do these fun ideas adam yeah and i'm like i suppose sure let's do it and we do it so jared it's nice to see that you uh you you uh impact others as well in the same way this is why i have no free time because i'm constantly filling it with i i goad people you say goat or goat, Zach? I said goad. Okay, I just wasn't sure if that was another pun. I just bug people until we do things, and then I'm like, oh, dang, now we have to do that. Now we have to do it, yeah. I was really just kind of jabbing at them, but now we're putting on a conference, I guess.

And I told my wife, I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to help put on a conference. She's like, that sounds like a big thing. I'm like, is it? There's six of us. Turns out it is, even with six. Even with six. I was going to say, so how does this – did we answer the question, though, first, why it exists?

I mean, Jared, goading you and not goading you, goading you. But what about the local community? What's the meetups like? You said it came from a meetup. So what was attendance like? Was it getting bigger? Is JavaScript exploding there as it is everywhere else? Yeah, I think it is. The meetup has grown. We have, I think,

over 700-some people in our meetup group on meetup.com slash NebraskaJS, if anybody's interested. And yeah, it's just kind of grown and grown and grown and i think the biggest uh biggest meetup event that we've had i think had around 80 some attendees and jared was speaking and jared spoke at that one um yeah so i guess jared was kind of our headliner whoa jared and angular i thought maybe you'd be talking about react or something like that to get a I guess Jared was kind of our headliner. Whoa, Jared. And Angular. I thought maybe you'd be talking about React or something like that

to get a crowd like that. Well, this was back when Angular was blowing up last year, a year and a half ago. Pre-2.0 Angular. Right. Okay. No hurts against them, just, you know, bias. Well, as we say, open source is hard.

Right. Everybody's out there trying to do awesome stuff. And, yeah, kind of the trends come and go, and Angular is definitely on a downtrend as far as overall popularity, or maybe mind share, but still out there doing cool things and people using it in mass. Everybody seems to be, if you put React in the title or if you go the route of Bruce reacting, a little sleight of hand there with the title there. Well done, Bruce. So big meetup. It got to as many as 80 at one point. Jared, that was a couple years ago on jared's point um so it got to a point

where it just naturally made sense to put on a conference and this is middle america um one thing i liked about some notes here which aren't exactly um easy to find for every conference number one you have a shuttle going to and from the airport which is free which is awesome so anytime i go to a conference i'm like you know where do i have to like spend money to get to and from because people always assume okay i'm going to a conference and the airport is gonna be right next door no no that's not always the case like in denver it was 60 to get to and from the airport back to like the conference land so it was it was quite expensive and then you gotta do it twice, right? To and from. So that's 120 bucks just on taxi to and from the airport. And then you got the walking distance,

the after party and things like that. So it seems like you guys have done some planning around this to also kick it off. Yeah, we're kind of trying to make it like an all-inclusive resort in Omaha. Like a sandals, as it were. Yeah. At the zoo. Yeah, go to the airport. Get the shuttle to the hotel. We're going to have a shuttle to the zoo and back. We're going to have two meals, I think it sounds like.

We're talking about finalizing the evening meal as well. Live band. Live band, that's neat. Yeah, that'll be really cool. At the after party, that's the live band time? Yep. Who is the band name?

The Super Bites. Super Bites, that's cool. Is it a local band or? Yeah, it is. All of them are local. I actually went to high school with two of them. The Super Bites? Yes.

All right. I just found them on Bandcamp. We'll link this up in the show notes because they are rocking the Super Mario style graphics, 8-bit, all the way. Yeah, I think that, Nick, don't they do some sampling with some unique hardware. Yeah. They use a Nintendo and a Game Boy, um, on stage and they have pre set up tracks that they, they created on those devices. Um,

so it's a really unique experience. So that's the after party. And we got all this time so far and we haven't talked about two of the, two of the names. I think almost anyone listening to the show might know, Ethan Marcotte and Christian. I always want to say it's Heilman or Heilman. Anybody know the correct pronunciation of Christian's last name? I do not.

What do you think, Jared? I will say Heilman, though. Heilman. I was going to go with Heilman. That's what I thought. Heilman. All right. Code Poet.

Code Poet. Those are, you know, I never read that as Code Poet, Jared. I always just took it as Code Poe 8. Me too. All right. Nice. We're learning. That's why they pay me the big bucks.

That's it. So Ethan Marcotte, he's doing the closing and Christian's starting it off. What was getting these two involved like? I mean, how did it happen? Did somebody email them? Was it, you know, you bumped into them at another conference? How did this work out? So Ethan has actually done some work with Filament Group,

which is the company I work for. So they did the Boston Globe sort of redesign, which was a huge or one of the biggest responsive web design redesigns a few years ago. So they kind of worked together, and that's how I kind of got that connection to Ethan. And did he come just with open arms, or did he have to be coerced? No, he was super excited to be involved. I did not have to coerce him at all.

No blackmail? Not that I could say on air. No, I'm just kidding. There waserce him at all. No blackmail? Not that I could say on air. No, I'm just kidding. There was no blackmail at all. Yeah, he's super excited to come out and come to the zoo. Come to the zoo. I like it. Hang out at the zoo.

What about Christian? I mean, he does love for the JavaScript world, and he's done all sorts of cool stuff. Always been a fan of his. So you got connections there as well? Yeah, well, not quite as tight, I would say. But I don't know how I got connected to Christian originally, but I've just kind of followed him online since I started blogging back in 2006 or 2007. So I've just kind of been connected through Twitter and blogs online. And I saw that he was going to be in the country because he's from London originally or currently, I should say.

And so he was going to be in the country and he actually rescheduled one of his flights back to London so that he could come out and speak. So very, very accommodating for us. You know, one of the things that people always get most concerned about when putting on conferences, one, will anybody show up? Two, will I get quality speakers or anything that's worthwhile for people to actually show up for? And if they do show up and the speakers show up too, well, everybody enjoy it. So, I mean, knowing all those three kind of pillars of fear, so to speak, when it comes to a conference.

I just coined that just now, by the way. The pillars of fear. Three pillars of fear. You should work at local news. I do work at local news. Any local news affiliate. Right here in Houston, myfoxhouston.com. No, but on a serious note, though, so like around the topics, around the keynote speakers, was there any – was there anybody like throwing up or getting upset or just like really just like ruining their day over just the worry, the anxiety that comes from those three things?

Definitely. Oh, three things. Definitely. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, there's a huge amount of stress that goes into running a conference. And we sort of had Ethan from the beginning, which was very good because that helped us, I think, get us more exposure. And so we had Ethan published before we even did the CFP, which I think helped us get a lot more submissions, sort of legitimized us as a conference before we even started.

And then we got Christian a few weeks ago. But getting the speakers there, I think, is just one small piece, one small pillar in the pillars of fear, as it were. Yeah, there's just so many other things that are going on that you have to worry about as well. So logistics are kind of a nightmare when it comes to conferences. What about financing and receipting and things like that? How does that play out with the six organizations you have? How does the responsibility and the financial responsibility and things like that play out? And coupons you have how does the responsibility and the financial responsibility and things like that play out and like who ponies up the first dollar how does it

work that's my biggest like how do you actually do a conference so i mean all the organizers sort of ponied up a fixed sum to get the because we formed an llc um to get it started and then uh sponsorship the sponsorship dollars started rolling in and we started doing ticket sales. And so we've been able to sort of stay ahead of the game in terms of paying receipts or paying invoices. So a legitimate business was set up to sort of be the crux of this thing, not just, hey, you're, in Jared's case, like Object Lateral or any of your guys' businesses. It didn't mix. You created your own organization and took some ownership in it to a degree.

Right, yeah. I don't know if I'd throw around the word legitimate that lightly, but certainly an LLC was formed. The state of Nebraska thinks we're legitimate. That's it. Yeah. That's correct. We can go.

Okay. Yeah. Well, that's all you gotta have right there. Yeah. Okay. So this is very much like setting up a, you know, a real live business basically. I mean, you're going to, at the end of the year, you're going to have, uh, you know, you're going to have pass through tax to somebody.

Uh, somebody is on the hook for some of this money. If there's any profit, right? That's the goal. That's why I said no profits. There's your goal right there. Right, no profits is the goal. Yep. Okay, I was just thinking from the audience perspective.

Insurance is a concern. We set up an LLC because there's some personal protections there against things going wrong. Yeah, cash flow. Actually, actually for us i've been surprised i thought cash flow would be a big problem uh aside from that one sponsorship thing that zach talked about we've actually been pretty cash flow positive as far as the down payments we have to put to reserve things and that this and that um i think had sponsors not stepped up so generously right away, I think it would have been a lot harder sledding because we would have to make tighter decisions and wait on things and rely on ticket sales. So we've been really fortunate that there's so many great sponsors here locally that hopped on board right away. Yeah, the sponsors were just like, i feel like they were waiting for something to

come around like this so they could jump on board really because it took very little coaxing to get sponsors so was it sponsors first speakers second is that i mean because just thinking from a cash flow standpoint you think about sales to a degree and you got to get sales to put a product out there and the product is the conference you can't put the conference on until you've got to get sales to put a product out there, and the product is the conference. You can't put the conference on until you get sponsors to commit and speakers to commit and things like that. And you've got to have a place to call home, so you can't get that until you put some money down. So it seems like this never-ending chicken and egg scenario,

at least for a first-time conference, first year. Yeah. Well, luckily a lot of our speakers have deferred reimbursement until the day of the conference. So that kind of helped us in the beginning. But, I mean, our sponsors really were so excited to get involved that we had a pretty good sum to start paying our bills very early. And I think it also helped that we refused to put people on the website some to start paying our bills very early.

And I think it also helped that we refused to put people on the website until we got payment. So we wouldn't put anybody's logo on there until we got money. That's a good rule to have right there. We're getting close to the end of the show. Let's take one more break while we have some time to hear from one of our awesome sponsors making this show possible. When we come back, we're going to talk about some closing topics like collaboration tools for the team.

I like that little note there, Jared. Didn't quite think about the collaboration necessary behind the scenes. And then the other thing I mentioned, which was the fear of nobody showing up. I'm kind of curious what y'all think about that. So let's pause here, listen to this awesome sponsor, and when we come back, we'll talk about those things. So, right back.

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Go and check them out. All right, we're back to close up the show with Nick, Zach, and Jared talking about JavaScript in the wild here in the middle of America, Nebraska. Man, I mean, I'm excited to get there for one. Jared, I haven't visited yet so that's you know i'm so excited to finally come up to omaha uh i've already done some business with local places around there ink um what's it uh the ink tank there yeah i've done some business with them you know work with you and stuff like that but not hadn't visited this this uh fabulous

place and there's finally a reason to go which which is this JavaScript conference we're talking about here. And I guess since we're talking about showing up, Nick, did you have any concerns yourself? You said yes to the anxiety earlier, but you didn't elaborate. So can you elaborate a bit on this idea of no one showing up, the fear of nobody showing up for a conference, and you being an organizer of it. Sure. I guess now, at this point, I'm not worried too much about people showing up, just seeing the ticket sales and the positive comments that we've gotten. But that was definitely a concern going into it.

I'm not sure if anybody will think that this is a good idea, but as Zach mentioned, getting Ethan on board right away really helped to, as he said, legitimize it. The thing that's really scary now is we're, you know, we're 16 days away from it at this point and there's so much left to do. We have all of these tickets and things kind of these plates still spinning. And then, you know, we'll get all of that settled in and be ready for the conference the day of. And then, you know, I'm just, my biggest fear is waking up in a cold sweat that morning and realizing we forgot microphones or something like, you know, something so necessary and yet so small that we just kind of overlooked it.

I'm really scared of that. But I think that we'll be, we'll be fine. It's just a, a terror thing that I have, I guess. But then finally, just will people have fun?

Will they enjoy the talks? Will there be technical problems there that we have to deal with on the spot? Will there be, yes, somebody getting, yeah, yes. Every time.

Is somebody going to get mauled by one of the animals that we have coming into the conference like hopefully not i don't even know what kind of animals we're having but elephants hopefully a porcupine yeah elephants porcupines lions kitty cats no i mean i think we porcupine is one of the animals that we might have. So yeah, I've heard that tarantulas maybe I need to increase that insurance deductible. Talk about that offline. Glad it's an LLC. Yeah.

All right. So let's something that you quite kind of mentioned there, Nick, it seemed like just this organization process behind the scenes with the rest of the six. So you got six people that joined the NEJS team to put this conference on this year. What are some of the things that you've done?

Who spearheaded it? Was there like a distinct leader? Was it sort of like all self-managed to come up with checklists? Or did you sort of divide up in teams? How did you all work to collaborate? I guess, since you don't work in the same office, obviously, because this is not like a legitimate business, as you've said, this is a conference and you got your own things

to do. How did you, you know, collaborate day to day to make these things happen over time? I think that we all kind of, we're all very self-driven and can work autonomously on things. We kind of knew what things at a high level we needed to tackle. If there is a distinguished leader, it would definitely be Zach. He kind of started putting things together, organizing things, organizing ways that we can communicate. And I think it was either Zach or Jared that recommended using Trello for organization.

So we've been using that and just adding, having lists of things to do and different stages for that and having everything as a card in there. And it's, it's been working out pretty well. Yeah. Trello is amazing. I don't, I don't think we could have organized a conference without it.

Yeah. Well, we, we're in Trello all day long. We use it to do change law weekly. So I we can high-five you on that one there. I could tell you more stories about Trello and agree with you, but I'll just leave it that I agree that Trello is super awesome. There isn't a tool out there that quite meets what it does for organizing people. The whole iJob process, whether you're doing software or not,

it's just really flexible to however you want to work. In addition to that, I've been taking cues as Adam and I have traveled around to conferences this year. We were at Space City JS in the spring, and you all know we were at GopherCon a few weeks back. So as I go to these conferences, I'm very cognizant of how they're running things because I'm involved. And one of the things that Space City did, which I think

was cool, and I think more conferences will start doing, is to open up a Slack team for the entire conference so all the attendees can hop in there. And so we did that recently for NEJS. In addition to that, we have kind of an organized private room and a room for speakers.

And one thing about trello is it's not great for just discussion you know uh it can get a little bit cumbersome for that yeah and we didn't realize it but we were doing too much just like chatting inside trello because we didn't have an auxiliary tool and so in the last month or so zach sent up a slack team and that has really um balanced out where we have kind of your immediate needs, quick feedback, you know, paste a stupid GIF in their chat room. And then you have Trello, which is all about the organized, you know, assigned things that need doing. I think that's really been a good combination of tools for us. Slack is the party in the front, and Trello is the business in the back. Yeah, really rounding out the NEJS mullet that we're going for us. Slack is the party in the front and Trello is the business in the

back. Yeah, really rounding out the NEJS mullet that we're going for here. I like it. Another important topic which we saw, Jared, since you mentioned GopherCon, I loved their idea of a diversity scholarship. Did y'all take some cues from that or was it somewhere else? But you seem to be focused on the inclusivity and the accessibility of the conference. So what was this diversity scholarship about and what were some, I guess, has there been anybody to take the free ticket? How was that process like? Yeah, so we are doing diversity scholarships. We're through a local company called Big Wheel Brigade.

They've offered 10 free tickets for people underrepresented in tech, whether that be gender, sex, sexuality, race, or veteran status or any number of other things. And we've had, I think we've redeemed almost half of those tickets. And they are confidential. So to other attendees, your badge isn't going to be different or anything. The ticket will be identical to any other attendee ticket. But I think we've only redeemed half of those so far.

Are there any caveats to that? Like what's the criteria to meet? Is it even you guys that take care of this, or is it totally through Big Will Brigade that they handle that? I see Beth's name here. I'm just wondering if she is totally taking over that at all points. Yeah, she is the point of contact for that. So she actually will go out and buy the tickets on our website using a special coupon code that we have for her. And so, yeah, that's kind of how that sponsorship works.

And there's really – they really aren't doing any question or interrogation involved with that. They just will, hey, you want a ticket? Okay, here's the information that we need, and we'll buy it for you. So it's not like a formal thing that you have to go through, like an application process. It's really just, hey, I would like to go to this conference. I'll get you a ticket.

I like the paragraph here under that form, too, because I think everybody approaches this topic sort of on their tippy toes because no one wants to offend anybody. But I like this bolded text you have here. If you would like to take advantage of this offer but are hesitant to publicly self-identify as belonging to an underrepresented group, please be assured that we will receive your request with acceptance and respect and we'll keep it confidential.

So I think it's just going the extra mile to, one, be inclusive and accepting of everyone and giving everyone an opportunity to be there, especially the underrepresented. So that's really neat that the way you've handled this and even having an outside company sort of, one, sponsor it and pay for those tickets and then just have a process for it. It seems like you really thought this through. I like it. Yeah, I think it worked pretty well.

They actually ran a little seminar not too long ago on sort of running inclusive events and dealing with sort of problems that can arise when you're an event organizer, which has been really helpful. And that's kind of where we got the idea to do something like this. So we got five more of these diversity scholarship tickets available. So if you're listening and you're a part of one of those groups, I just read that text there. You'll be accepted and respected and more importantly, confidential. So feel free to get in touch and take advantage of this if you're in one of those groups. Cool. What's some closing thoughts? Jared, help me out here with some closing thoughts. I know we normally have some closing questions and you're sort of not playing interviewer yeah i mean i think closing thoughts is um obviously there's still a handful of tickets available uh omaha is

a really cool city um centrally located so if you're anywhere in the midwest it's actually pretty easy to get over here we'd love to have you change. Log will be there, especially at the after party and shooting our awesome film series beyond code. So, um, you'll get to meet Adam and myself and DK, our video guy. Um,

yeah, we're just hoping it's a good time where we've been, uh, trying to line up all our ducks in a row. And, um, so far, you know,

we've had a few, uh, freak out events, but I think we've pulled together as a team and are feeling pretty good about how it's going to turn out. I think one thing we didn't talk about, which I forgot until just now, is the hardest part of the whole conference for us was probably naming it.

Maybe that was why it took so long for us to come up with the conference. Because we went through dozens and dozens of names trying to be witty and cool. And around and around and around we went. And eventually we realized we're not witty and we're not cool. So we're just going to name it using our meetup's name. I don't know. Maybe, Nick, can you remember any of the names that we had on the table? I know the one that was kind of a frontrunner for a while was FlyoverJS.

Yes. Because Nebraska is kind of one of those flyover states. But we had tons of them. Can you think of any others? Oh, man. That was the one that really came to mind. That was my favorite for a long time. We also had, well, there was one that we wanted right off the bat,

but it was taken as there's another conference with the same name. Right. Yeah, I can't remember. We had Bullseye.js Central Standard.js Heartland.js BugEater.js yeah that's kind of a thing I think a thing that people outside Nebraska

will have no idea what it means Little Web on the Prairie that was one of yours Zach there was spreadsheets talking about arguments. Nothing quite as argumentative as your favorite name, not liked by your co-patriots. So what about the subtitle then? Will that remain? Each year, will it always be at the zoo?

I guess you'll probably know more after this year if things go badly, but somebody gets eaten, for example. We come back with one less JavaScripter out there because the lion got hungry. But, I mean, will it always be JavaScript in the wild, or do you think you'll kind of keep mixing it up each year? I think we'll probably try a different venue next year. I don't know. It depends on how it goes, obviously.

But I didn't expect that we would do uh at the zoo every year so okay well that's nice to show some different areas well i i guess uh i don't really have any more questions myself um i'm used to always asking some of the the the famous questions at the end. Does anybody feel totally strong on answering the who's your programming hero question? Jared, you never get asked that question. You're always on the other end. How about you? I want to pass this one

on to Nick. He's your hero? No, I want to know Nick's hero. Fine. I can answer it if you don't want to, Nick. That's fine. I'm going to pass it along to Zach and also just name Zach. Oh, wow, Zach.

Wow, that's a low bar, Nick. I want to say John Rezik. I think that not in terms of necessarily like, I mean, he's a very super talented programmer, obviously. But I think the way he ran the jQuery community is just kind of an amazing thing. And he definitely grew a very inclusive and welcoming community. And I think a lot of that was just because of his personality. And, yeah, maybe that dates me a few years. I don't think it dates you.

I mean, I think if I had to make a list of many heroes, John would definitely be in the list because of the same reasons. He sort of came out of the cut, too, with jQuery. He just shared it one day in Boston at a meetup, which is sometimes how the best software comes out into the open source public. And then there was several other ways that you could do what jQuery did. Well, there weren't that many, but jQuery sort of made it really easy to learn. And then even the way

like you said, the community sort of sprouted up around it. It seems to just grow really, really fast yeah so and then john is always he's never really backed down from giving talks and organizing and speaking in front of people and stuff like that i know that we've never had him on this show because i never emailed him but nonetheless um we would like to have john the show at some point we just never have i guess with that is there anything else you want to have John on the show at some point. We just never have. I guess with that, is there anything else you want to cover about the conference or heroes or anything else that might be on anyone's mind that we can, maybe a particular sponsor?

I did want to say one thing, I guess not related to sponsorship, but the thing that I think I've learned the most about running a conference has been how difficult it is. And you definitely see when you attend conferences, you see those in a new light. And I guess I would encourage everyone out there to the next time you go to a conference, if personal space is not an issue for you, hug your conference organizer because it is a ton of work. It's a ton of work and it's sometimes very thankless work. And people are doing these development community conferences

not for money. There's a lot of conferences that are just sort of community driven and people are doing them sort of as a labor of love just to grow their local development community and sort of give the community more exposure in a wider sense. So definitely give some love to your organizers if you see them. I'd just like to thank the local community. You know, Omaha has a great development community and they're very inspiring. Everyone is always passionate about what they're working on. And, you know, aside from Jared motivating us to get this started,

you know, it's really the community that was doing it too. Just the number of people here that just do great things is huge and we want to be able to share that with the world. Well, I think I can agree on on jared's help there he's helped me out a lot quite a bit making things happen whenever i'm like hemming and hawing so jared you seem to seem to seem to do it everywhere man so good for you on that part uh so just to just to summarize uh any js conf is on our friday august 7th There are still tickets available. If you're in a marginalized or underrepresented group, there is five more confidential tickets that you will be respected.

So submit your information for that if you'd like to take advantage of that. For those of you out there who are thinking about this awesome conference, it's all about animals, elephants, at the zoo, JavaScript getting wild, so it's going to be in the wild. JavaScript in the wild. So, exciting, exciting times here. So,

um, the website to go to is what? NEJSConf.com Correct. I'm noticing, uh, I'm noticing like an SSL issue on your site. Is noticing an SSL issue on your site. Is there an SSL issue on your site? I hope not. No?

So it should be subdomainless, so it should be just nejsconf.com, not www. That's right. We don't like the www stuff. That's the way the dodo... Four extra characters you gotta take. Nobody needs that. Nobody needs that.

So if you're interested in this conference, the change log will be there. We'll see you there. Hop on camera. Say some things for Beyond Code. Jared, I didn't tell you this, but we got a new piece of equipment we're bringing with us that everyone's going to love. So no drones. No drones. Not yet. That's maybe sometime soon

uh but the equipment we're bringing this time is a steadicam so we're pretty excited about this because we'll be able to walk and like follow people or like you know just move lightly with the camera they call it flying with the camera. But nonetheless, excited about that new piece of equipment. So every time we go to a conference, we go with something that is some sort of new toy that DK likes to play with. This will give DK a chance to fly

the camera around and get some good shots and have some fun. So we're excited about that. So anyjsconf.com Go there and get your ticket we'll see you there on august 7th it's a friday at the zoo with the elephants and the rest of the job community and with that everybody let's let's close the show out and say goodbye see ya thanks We'll see you next time. you