Some days ago, on the 30th of November, I gave my first talk at BarcampLX, which is a really nice and open event you can go to and present! If you’re interested, you can read more about the concept.

Here’s the talk:

The slides deck.

During the whole talk, Chris looked very emotional. The subject of the talk was mainly about the community and how we should behave with each other. Here are some key aspects (IMO) of this: Don’t fight over technology. ‘Their just tools, not religions’. Think more about ‘what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail’. Be more risky and try more. Don’t go for a technology just because. People matter more than the technical stuff. It’s essential to have an healthy community. Sometimes it’s better to talk about negative aspects/issues privately because people are more receptive. Help each other. Enjoyed the talk overall. It was nice! 😁

Again, this was more of a community focused talk which, as of now, are the most interesting for me. Here are some key aspects of Isaac’s talk: Encourage new interactions to be positive. Turn negative interactions into positives. Programmers need soft skills too. Be empathetic. Sometimes it’s better to talk about something privately. Be careful of what you write because you are what you write. IRL ≠ text.

So, Tracy in LxJS talked about how to solve conflicts between developers mainly and to be in community. Some key aspects of what she said: Words and tone matters. Be careful. Try not to commit logical failures. Avoid fights and don’t mention stupid irrelevant points. Try to understand the conflict and suggest resolutions. Communicate with the opposition is also key.

talk: https://vimeo.com/52639927 This one had music in the background. A soft 🎻. It was about how to behave if we want to change society and what most people think or do wrong. Key aspects: You can’t make things perfect but you can always make them better. Leadership is making constant decisions. You should do something because you believe and really want to make a difference. Don’t try to go big at once. Do one thing at a time. You can’t face fear alone; but ‘the thing you must do is the one you fear’; and what you think you can do is irrelevant. What you do is what matters. These are not just work lessons but life lessons that can be applied to every situation on our lives.

talk: https://vimeo.com/77289729 On this talk by the creator on NPM, Isaac Schlueter, he focus on the leadership in the open source communities. Some key points: Being persistent is important. Great leaders come up through natural growth and communication with community. If something goes wrong: think about what to do in the future to avoid the same problem; and own and take responsibility for it. Leadership involves making constant improvements and corrections over time. When thinking about something, don’t look at your past self, look at the present. Don’t care about looking foolish. It will happen. Help the others. “Empathy is a core engineering value”

So this talk was about modularity and how great it would be if we all created smaller modules for specific functions. Here’s some key aspects: Modules allow to reuse code easily. NPM modules can be used in both browser and node environments. He also talked about using NPM for modules of basically every language. It would be interesting if that happened, but for that to happen, a lot would need to change.

Comparatively to his other talk, this one is much better in my opinion. Not forgetting that Mikeal’s the Community Manager of the Node.js Foundation, here are some key aspects he mentioned: Node.js is the fastest growing open source platform in the world. Full Stack isn’t just front-end and back-end anymore and it needs innumerous skills: web front-end; phones and tablets; desktop; API services; IoT devices; cloud backend; Node.js can work with all of the previously mentioned platforms. Front-end development is much different now than it was in 2010. Node.js is good for IoT because JavaScript is event-driven and that’s how real world and IoT devices work. API usage has been increasing dramatically over the last years. Node.js is very efficient with microservices.

This talk was a bit different from the previous ones in terms of content. Jan focused more on the political and business side of open-source and what should we do to improve society. Some key aspects: Build more web apps instead of platform-specific ones. Government/public money should be invested on more open source projects, such as Wikipedia, which are accessible to everyone. Use both politics and business to make the world better with open source. One interesting question he made was: ‘why do we all have to pay for our own internet if we could have a more powerful shared internet node paid by all of us?’. I actually think that would be an interesting idea. Internet could be free or, if not, accessible everywhere and paid through taxes. But that would need a good government and good system to make it all work well I think.

Due to the name of this talk, I was thinking Mikeal was going to talk more about the community itself, good parts, bad parts, issues and solutions, but he didn’t. He talked about the Node.js community and the topics were kind of random in my opinion: from the streams and the fact that Node implemented quite a good interface to cryptocurrency and other. He also mentioned GitHub and the fact that open sourcing was much harder before it.