NordicJS 2019

A few weeks ago I attended the developer conference NordicJS for the first time. I’ve been to quite a few other conferences in Sweden since I started working as a developer, but I have to say that this was something else. There was this very welcoming and positive feeling in the air and among the attendees that I haven’t experienced anywhere before.

All the talks was of very high quality and I can recommend watching them all, but below are a few thoughts on the talks that resonated with me the most.

Value Driven Development

by Isa Silveira

The very first talk of the conference was Isa Silveira talking about Value Driven Development and opening the talk in a very personal, authentic and vulerable way. She talked about meeting her current partner at last years NordicJS, moving to Sweden from Brazil and using that as a segway into the core of the talk, value driven development.

She talked about how we as developers have an accountability for what we do but that we’re also in a position of power in todays society. How are we gonna shift our culture from being solution driven to value driven? And can we use software as a tool to reduce human suffering?

The talk was a great start of the conference and really set the tone for the next two days, and I wholeheartedly recommend watching it.

Watch on YouTube.

Gettin’ into the (Tensor)Flow

by Piérre Reimertz

I’ve tried to learn TensorFlow way to many times, and failed way to many times. I’ve never found a tutorial or introduction that was light hearted enough to keep me inspired but still compact enough to actually teach me something. But along came Piérres talk at NordicJS.

By combining a fun, practical introduction to real life examples of machine learning with an introduction to the internals of TensorFlow(.js) we get an excellent talk using machine learning as a web developer.

I can’t say that I know TensorFlow after watching this talk, but I feel that I have better foundation and I’m definately more inspired to try and learn TensorFlow.js again.

Watch on YouTube.

Build dumb sh*t

by Sara Vieira

Finishing off the entire conference was this amazing talk by the hilarious Sara Vieira about “building dumb shit”. I don’t want to go into to much details about the talk because I believe it’s much better if you watch it for yourself. But I’ll say that you’ll hear about (not) making the world a better place, why useless is not worthless, what an NPM drinking game looks like and much much more. Just watch it.

It was a perfect mix of serious and silly and ended up being my favorite talk of the conference. So inspiring and motivating that at a hackathon a week later I developed a chrome extension that screams back when you scream at your computer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Watch on YouTube.

Finally

The entire conference was live streamed at Twitch (day 1 & day 2) and all videos have also been uploaded to YouTube. It was by far the greatest conference I’ve attended so if you get the chance to attend I highly recommend it.

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Last update: October 23, 2019

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