CityJS Singapore 2023

End of July we had the opportunity to attend CityJS 2023 in Singapore where we participated in a few workshops and the conference on the last day. It has been a great event, well-organised, lots of energy, insights and ability to re-connect with our friends in the community in Singapore.

CityJS

A community event organised by the community and is a JavaScript Conference that evolved from the popularity and success of a monthly meet-up put together by 4 different JavaScript groups in London, including London JS Community, JS Monthly, Halfstack and Node User Group.”

The conference is for developers, solution architects, and other tech individuals aiming to stay in touch with the industry. CityJS aims for individuals to be updated on innovative changes around the industry and JS as an entity.‍

Their conferences are happening around the world organised by a team of dedicated volunteers.

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CityJS Singapore

Singapore is one of the many locations for CityJS with its first event in Singapore in 2022 during COVID times even has proven successful and strong interest in the Singapore JS community.

The latest edition in 2023 now after COVID has turned out really well with many excellent speakers attending including from abroad.

‍The event featured 2 full days of workshops plus a full day of conference talks in the end.

The venue at Life Long Learning Institute was almost fully seated with many attendees also from abroad including many attendees hoping over from Thailand just for the event.

Our highlights

Out of the many amazing talks during the event we have picked 4 talks that impressed us the most on conference day:

Do your regional websites talk funny?

Chen Hui Jing kicked of the event with a lot of energy speaking about the challenges building international websites. She provided many real-world examples where projects have failed either in translations, considering language layout and punctuation. In some cases with mistakes leading to differences in missing 000 digits in other languages.

UNTestable - It's just pressing a button, how hard could it be?

Tai Shi Ling gave a wonderful talk on challenges test automation engineers face when testing user interfaces by sharing a few selected common issues she experienced in her career.

This was very insightful especially since engineers hardly think about the pain of testers or the impact of their implementation choices leading not only to accessibility issues but also testability problems along the way.

Reinventing Vue: Lessons Learned

Evan You (Creator of Vue.js) shared a phantastic presentation of the lessons learned of the migration journey to a new major version 3 for Vue.js and the impact it had on the community and the maintainers and him.

There were a lot valuable reflecting feedback and learning that can also be applied to any other library or open-source project to make releases and introduction of breaking changes easier for everyone.

We really enjoyed this session giving hands-on example and possible suggestion how to overcome these challenges which Vue.js was able to eventually.

A Tale of Two Webs

Kyle Simpson gave the closing keynote talk at the conference on Friday evening and it was an inspiring one.

Kyle took the approach of speaking both in past and future switching between a pre-recorded talk in today’s time and giving a talk from the future.

The talk painted a picture of a future web where local-first apps dominate over the today’s landscape of going cloud-native criticizing today’s approach of using the cloud to control data access, dependency and privacy issues that are easier to manage taking a local-first approach.

Next

CityJS Singapore has been a really exciting conference with so many inspiring talks and also showing that also smaller communities like Singapore deserve more attention since they have equal passion for technology, so we appreciate what the team at CityJS is doing.

We are looking forward to the next events in Singapore and other places both as attendee, organizer or sponsor in the future.