Last week, I presented my talk at the inaugural Node Interactive ’15, in Portland, Oregon. It’s probably the largest Node.js conference in the world! My talk was on Node.js at Capital One. You might wonder: bank and Node.js? What they have in common? The best kept secret, which is not a secret at all is that Capital One, is moving into being a technology company with a focus on finance… not just a bank. It’s worth watching my talk if you’re are interested in hear about challenges of bringing innovation to a large company in a heavily regulated field.
There were a lot of enterprise attendees and sponsors at the conference. A stark contrast with NodeConf which is more of a casual hangout in the wood rather than a typical conference. One of the opening keynote’s quotes: The next killer app is not an app, but an API. Node is great for APIs! (Not an exact quote.) So IBM, Intel and the likes are betting huge on Node for the APIs.
There were three tracks: front-end, back-end and Internet of Things (IoT). I mostly attended back-end. One of the best talks on that track was Node.js API Pitfalls; Can You Spot Them? by Sam Roberts. Here are the slides. From other tracks, I remember the talk on Electron. It’s a neat tool to build your cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies. You can use Node right in HTML of Electron’s view. Mind blown!
An interesting takeaway from the panel discussions is how easy it is to start contributing to the core compare to 1–2 years ago. Thanks to the new model of governance (OPEN open source). For photos, tweets and slides, I created a Storify so I can refer to the resources later. (They are in no particular order.)
The organization was exceptional. I was impressed with the team. They helped me to set up book signing (and locate a missing package in the hotel). By the way, thanks for all the people who came to get my books. They all were gone in 20 minutes.
Some attendees complained that the talks were took short. 20 min each. Not enough to dive deep or code. I liked the format, because you won’t get bored or stuck in a uninteresting session just because you are too polite to leave in the middle. My request is to have more rooms and more tracks. Considering that they recorded the talks and open sourced them on the Node.js YouTube channel, having more tracks would not be an issue since you can watch whatever you missed later.
It was a great conference especially considering that this was the first time Linux Foundation organized it (Node is a part of it now). I met lots of familiar-from-the-avatars faces. Again, such a fantastic event. Looking forward to Node Interactive 2016!
