NodeConfEU 2024 Recap

12 Nov 2024 by Meghan Sinnott

NodeConfEU was founded in 2012 by Cian Ó Maidín of Nearform and is Europe's longest-running and leading Node.js conference. This year around 200 software developers, founders, and open source enthusiasts gathered at Waterford Castle for three days of talks, workshops, and merriment. Here’s a wrap up of the Fireproof team’s wonderful time there.

Workshop

Chris Anderson, Meno Abels, and Steven Vandevelde of Fireproof hosted a workshop called Self-Sovereign Auth with UCANs: Add save and sharing to any app where they walked attendees through UCAN delegation for sharing databases and had people playing with Bloopernet.

Here is the link to the workshop steps and here’s more information on the Bloopernet project. We had amazing responses from attendees, thanks for lighting a fire under us! Here’s one of our favorites:

“If I told my CTO about this, he’d say I was full of shit.” - Stephan Smith, NodeConfEU workshop attendee the moment he understood the power of Fireproof.

Friends Old and New

NodeConfEU is known for gathering brilliant minds in an intimate setting, providing ample opportunities for community members from around the world to share what they’re working on in a collaborative and friendly environment. It’s an ideal place for founders and leading engineers to bounce ideas off of each other and have the chance to dive deep into their topics of expertise with eager listeners.

Outside of the typical discussions around open source innovation, performance optimization, and software quality, there were a handful of talks about AI. I was fortunate to catch Mikola Lysenko, Tamar Twena Stern, and Aileen Villanueva Lecuona speak on the subject.

Mikola spoke about his AI-powered malware hunting at scale with Socket, breaking down the steps necessary to optimize for cost, latency, and reliability in their security efforts. It was interesting to learn about their strategic approaches in combining static analysis with LLM-based detection.

Tamar and Aileen both helped get the community up to speed on AI. Tamar’s talk was a general introduction to preventing AI hallucinations, and Aileen showed how to use AI in data pipelines. Both talks were very well received and much appreciated, which shows that there is always more to learn about AI.

It should be noted that the Code and Learn workshop led by Patty O'Callaghan, entitled “Ensuring quality and safety in LLM-based applications” was voted number one highlight of all of NodeConfEU at an informal survey hosted at a pub after the event in Dublin.

Additional talks we enjoyed were James Snell’s breakdown on what “Node.js compatibility” really means (we thought we conquered Zalgo, but there’s more to do!), and discussions on esm which demonstrated the mutual appreciation between contributors, specifically the props shared between Geoffrey Booth and Joyee Cheung. As someone relatively new to open source, it’s inspirational to hear engineers share their tips for collaboration, listening, and learning from each other and how different view points can crack open whole new worlds of potential.

Shout out to Jonathan Frere who showed us a new language feature that gives more control over garbage collection, Ethan Arrowood from HarperDB who talked about compatibility between Node and WebStreams, and Zbyszek Tenerowicz who led a killer workshop entitled Memory Management and Leak Detection that showed how to look inside programs’ resource usage.

There was great joy in seeing long time friends in the community launch new projects that benefit us all. Both Isaac Schlueter and Ryan Dahl spoke and announced launches that are complimentary to each other. Isaac shared an inside look at the motivation behind vlt, the new package manager and Ryan discussed leveling up JavaScript™ with JSR, a modern module registry.

And no trip around the world is complete without reaching out to local friends. On our way back through Dublin we got to catch up with Colm McHugh, formerly of Couchbase, who caught us up on his journey with Salesforce and new adventures with Microsoft.

Fun

In addition to nightly music (including Chris snagging the karaoke mic for some database raps…), walks around the island and a stroll on the beach in Tramore, and lots of great late night conversations, we got to play a good old fashioned game of Capture the Flag.

The NodeConfEU 2024 flag proudly hung from the battlements of Waterford Castle for less than 24 hours before it was liberated. A slew of mischievous conference attendees found the hidden passage up the ancient tower to the roof, eager to swipe the flag, only to find it had already been replaced with a Fireproof flag. 😉

I was down enjoying live local music when Chris rushed past me saying “Follow me! They have the Fireproof flag!” but by the time I had removed my heels to mount the many stairs, I had lost Chris, so I followed my nose until I discovered a mysterious passage hidden behind the mirror, complete with a creepy mannequin. Down the spiral staircase came a hurried stream of engineers, popping out like clowns out of a car and behind them was Chris! I quickly realized we were mid-chase and, after Chris leapt down the remaining flights of stairs, I scrambled down dressed in a cocktail dress and piled on the crowd, helping Chris wrastle our flag away. Though we tried to return the NodeConf flag to its place of honor, it fell into the hands of some Frenchmen. Forgive us, Ireland.

Shoutouts

Cian led the entire conference with open arms, promising to help any Americans who wished to stay in Ireland after the elections through the Visa process… but the warm, welcoming nature conference carried through due to the hard work of Cliona Quinlan of Mesh, and her hardworking team of planners. If you need to host an event that is sure to be well considered, fun, and community-forward, look no further.

And finally, let’s hear it for Nico Kaiser who, in addition to being an engineer themself, is a phenomenal photographer. He attended nearly every talk, workshop, and event to document the fun. Every decent photo shown above is his. Check out all of his conference photos here.

Tagged: events