I have written and talked about how I’ve stopped going to user group sessions, but recently I’ve found the urge to reconnect with some sort of community again. I still find bigger conferences like Techorama or ngEurope interesting, especially if they get me out of the Microsoft-centric world I find myself in due to working for big corporations in Belgium.
So I was pleasantly surprised to receive a mail from one Jan Rauter where he introduced a new community, revolving around Javascript. It’s name? JS Valley.
From what I’ve understood, JS Valley will host sessions regularly in different cities in Flanders: Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels mainly. Which is nice for someone living in Bruges, because it’s not always easy to drive an hour or more on weekdays, combining it with family life, etc.
The first meetup attracted about 50 people, so there must be at least a small need or interest for this sort of thing. I hope this grows in the future. Because javascript is so prevalent today, regardless of your stack (full JS, .NET, Java, PHP,…), I believe this is possible.
There were three session during this meetup.
The first was on the new features in ES6 and 7. Basic stuff like let, const, arrow functions, rest parameters, etc were covered. But also more interesting features (for me) like the spread operator (very cool), destructuring, default parameters combined with destructuring, etc.
Then there was a session on Angular 2 and Typescript and finally a quick 6-step demo of improving an Angular 1.x architecture.
All in all a very interesting evening. There were some rough edges, but nothing that can’t be fixed. And Jan was open to all remarks and suggestions, so I think they’ll sort it out.
Kudos to Jan and Joeri for starting this and to the speakers for their sessions. I hope to see some more sessions in the future!