BrazilJS was a fantastic conference. It was very professionally run with some fantastic speakers. I had a blast.
This is the second of three blog posts. The first was about the experience in Porto Alegre called Obrigado BrazilJS. This one is photos and the like from the conference. The third is about my talk specifically called The Perf Doctor Is In.
I got to speak about web performance in a talk called “The Perf Doctor is In”.
There was a camera guy that kept shooting footage and at one point, I threatened to throw a pose if he came back on stage. Sure enough, here he came and I carried through.
The camera guy was BRILLIANT. He shot the video all day and managed to cut, produce and publish by the closing ceremonies. I’m very likely to be hiring this guy for work in the near future.
Renato Mangini was there for Google. Great guy and contributed to the conference a ton beyond his talk and Google’s sponsorship. He was personally involved in a lot of aspects of it.
Thibault Imbert did a great talk on JavaScript concurrency.
Yes – there’s a story… 🙂 Turns out that one of Thibault’s favorite musical artists is Brazilian and there was a look alike in the crowd who was a great sport and personality.
And when Thibault wasn’t on stage, he was intently listening to the talks. I jest. He was actually listening 99% of the time. I happened to catch him on a break grabbing a little wifi while the attendees were grabbing coffee.
I met Robert Nyman from Mozilla in Scotland at WhiskyWeb. He’s a great guy who really knows the web.
He didn’t like this picture but I did and since I’m the photographer… 🙂
And I wasn’t the only one who discovered new drinks in Brazil. I’m not even sure what it is but it looked fantastic…
And Robert believes in web standards.
It was the first time that I had seen Douglas Crockford speak. He did the closing keynote.
It was great meeting him and grilling him about everything from the future of Ecmascript to where he saw languages like TypeScript.
I wasn’t the only fanboy there. 🙂
And Douglas wasn’t my only hero that I got to hang out with. Angus Croll is a fantastic speaker that I first saw speak at JSConf. I get smarter every time I listen to him speak.
Jean Carlo Emer gave a great talk truly understanding the ethos of JavaScript. I thought this was a particularly gutsy talk with Crockford in the audience. 🙂
Demian Borba from Blackberry really surprised me with all of the stuff that Blackberry is doing around in car stuff that goes well beyond voice. They’re looking at heads up displays and a whole bunch more.
It was a true pleasure to meet the softly spoken Caridy Patino from the YUI team at Yahoo. Super smart guy who always had a smile on his face.
He dove into Node.JS talking about the good, the bad and the ugly of the project with solid advice on when to and when not to use it.
I love it when a “selfie” turns out. They almost never do.
Stoyan Stefanov from Facebook was a pleasure to meet. I got smarter just by being near him. He’s the guy behind YSlow 2.0 and a bunch of other stuff that’s been pivotal to many modern day web developers.
Zeke Sikelianos from Heroku maintains their Node.JS stack. He’s hysterical and very smart. There were many topics that came up over the week that I couldn’t make up my mind on until Zeke would quietly speak his piece and everything would snap crystal clear in my head.
So much good food.
No, seriously, so much good food…
And the dancers that performed after the speaker dinner at the Churrascaria (read more about them in my previous post called Obrigado BrazilJS) were fantastic.
I loved the guy with the boleadeira.
Not only was he absolutely amazing,
he was an amazing showman and brought Robert Nyman up on stage and while blindfolded, knocked a broken stub of a cigarette out of his mouth. It was amazing.
Yes, he’s one of my heroes.
And I know what I want to be when I grow up…
There was a little drinking at dinner, and after dinner, and before dinner.
And there might have been a little staged violence (notice the smile on everyone’s faces – nobody from Mozilla got hurt during the shooting of this blog post)…
I really liked that the conference organizers took care of the speakers. We were picked up from the airport, shuttled us to and from the conference, translated to English for us (Seriously, this is a cool deal as I’ve been to a number of conferences where I didn’t understand a damn thing because it was all in a different language except for my talk. They even gave us this little welcome to Porto Alegre pack. Great touch of class.
One of our fantastic organizers – Felipe N. Moura, the “handsome” one… 😉
Jaydson Gomes was our other organizer with an amazing beard.
Without these guys, JavaScript conferences wouldn’t be happening in Brazil. They are amazing guys and I’m proud to be friends with them.