A new day begins
Morning is just breaking over Stockholm when we pack up our survival kits and leave our hotels and head for the boats. Alex was staying in Vasastan and I next to Globen. So separately we made our way to Gamla stan to catch the boats. Alex had the foresight to get his wrist band the night before at the official pre conference drinks, but I still had to get mine…
Several hundred people are waiting for their wrist bands at the docks. Luckily Alex got there early and held a spot in the queue for me. We also ran in to a few people we knew, Johan Leitet with friends from the Linneus university in Kalmar.
Our ride, the esteemed former steamer (see what I did there? :)) Norrköping. Riding in style is important and the other two boats where, if larger and more modern, not as sweat as ours.
All of the attendees milling around the entrance hall. Here you get to fix your name tag in silver or gold on black. That among with a lot of stickers, offers, a themed cap and other swag was handed out at the doors.
Intro presentation with our awesome presenter Daniel Beauchamp (@pushmatrix). Nothing spectacular in itself but check that stage! Seriously awesome and then some …
We also had time to get new a perspective on things in between the talks with the help of the Oculus rift developer preview available at one of the exhibiters. Other fun activities includes: a real barista to make you some nice Java, lots of candy and promo stuff of cause, a hoard of really nice people from different companies, both exhibiters and visitors, to talk to and a hacking challenge to beat (try your teeth at http://gui-challenge.valtech.se/). Alex and I got onto the leaderboard at places 6 and 7: http://gui-challenge.valtech.se/leaderboard
Oh and there are speakers of course, the full list can be found at http://nordicjs.com/schedule. On stage here is Sergi Mansilla, that works on the Firefox OS, talking about reactive js (https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions), a different model for handling events/iteration in programming. One of the really nice technical talks of the day.
Leah Culver is talking about the nice Javascript APIs that Dropbox offer to developers. In all honesty it’s a fifty-fifty sales pitch and technical talk but the content is good and feels relevant and Leah brings a lot of energy to the talk.
Not every talk is a technical talk, Emily Rose did a live demo of some midi programming and hardware hacking, but with an eye to pushing for a simplification of creating music, earlier in the day and above is Caroline Drucker talking about equality in the workplace in general and gender equality specifically.
All good things come to and end and so did day one at Nordic.js. 12 busses crammed to the overhead baggage shelfs took all the conference attendees to Trädgården in Stockholm for an epic after party. The invitations had gone out to all of the tech community in Stockholm and the amount of people queuing was fantastic.
Hamburgers and beers all around. I think they kept going until pretty late. Alex and me retreated a bit earlier to get a good nights sleep and prepare for day two.
Tomorrow will bring Tom Dale, Hakim and Douglas Crockford, it’s gonna be great. See you then!