dotJS 2024

It was five years since Paris hosted the dotJS developer conference. The conference is a compilation of short and medium length talks on the many new emerging trends and technologies the web has to offer. In my opinion it has been one of the strongest European conferences I have been lucky enough to attend and being that it is in Paris it is very easy for me to get to!

This year it was hosted in the Folies Bergère Theatre, a cabaret music hall located in the 9th Arrondissement of Paris. You can watch the conference online, but I cannot stress enough the benefits of attending in person. For starters you get access to much more when at the venue including the chance to talk to speakers and conference partners which massively adds to the value you gain from the event. Furthermore, attending in person immerses you in the talks and removes external distractions and really helps you observe the incredible talks being delivered. Finally, being able to network with other attendees and discuss ideas really helps you gain more insight to what concepts you could take back and apply to your own projects!

I was lucky enough for Jagex to fund the trip as part of their learning and development budget so after some fighting with our in-house travel tool, I had secured a hotel, conference ticket and Eurostar travel along with associated connections in one booking. The Eurostar is an excellent choice for visitors from the UK as it deposits you right in Paris a short walk from most hotels and the conference venue.

I arrived the day before the conference and after some brief sight-seeing I settled in for a night at the hotel before the early morning walk to the theatre.

This year you were required to print your tickets in advance which did seem a little annoying for a professional web conference - I feel we should either now be using e-tickets or have the tickets collected along with the lanyard after entry, but this was only a minor nit.

The doors open and there is a wide arrange of food and drink available before the conference starts. This year was a one-day event the packed in talks from a wide-range of disciplines from testing, architecture, AI, page speed performance and even Mario Kart 3 in js (yes you read that right).

As a front-end developer my preference for topics tends to lean towards the visual layer of web development, quintessentially the users visual experience and despite there not being many talks on this area, the event was engaging and interesting.

The morning talks ranged from Ben Lesh talking about Push Vs Pull to James Quick relating Dante's 9 circles of hell to the evolution of page performance. It is a talent I greatly admire to take programming concepts and deliver them in an enlightening easy-going format that nearly any type of developer in the room could appreciate.

In between talks there were discussions with developers, snack breaks and a chance to meet and interact with speakers and fellow attendees. The conference hosts did a superb job blending the content together and keeping the event flowing and Nessrine Berrama and Christophe Porteneuve deserve massive credit here!

The event continued with further awesome topics including signals, API design and even a curve ball talk on applying the "Multi Armed Bandit" theory to product delivery!

Lunch was an excellent choice of food and drink along with a chance to watch partner talks and chat with more fellow attendees. I found, to my surprise that Jagex (or rather RuneScape) is somewhat very well-known at these events - even if I do have to suffer the occasional jibe about the quality of our games' (yes Old School RuneScape too) website. One of my unexpected takeaways was learning the phrase:

Pile technologique propriétaire héritée

to help describe some of what powers the older parts of the RuneScape website (I hope I got that right)!

The afternoon produced more exceptional talks including one on Web Assembly by David Flanagan - I will need to watch this back a few times to take it all in, but it was very eye-opening, and Spin looks like a great tool!

The final talk was the one I had been most looking forward to. Jagex uses the Vercel stack (and so does my own portfolio site) to deliver a wide range of web content in the last couple of years. The speaker was Malte Ubl who is the CTO of Vercel. His talk around the use of React components in AI was very inspiring - so much so that evening I had to build a quick tech-demo later that night.

As the talks concluded there was further opportunities for food and drink and to mingle with other attendees in the breakout area.

Overall, I enjoyed dotJS 2024, although I do feel it did miss the mark in some areas, but that could be the bias front-end developer in me who dreams of making high fidelity web pages over chasing page speed performance and API construction. I hope they can bring back dotCSS in the near future to partner with it and make it a 2 day or more long event again. But I have no doubt I want to be back for 2025 so until then...

adieu Paris