About two years ago, Sebastian and I had our first chats about having a JavaScript conference in our town of Linz. And this January, we made our vision reality and launched ScriptConf, a conference about JavaScript. Giving it the (quite bold) tagline “The conference this city needs”, we wanted to make JavaScript more popular in Linz, while having a great time with an amazing community.

Sebastian and I are avid conference goers. And if you’ve seen lots and lots of conferences around the world, your idea of how a conference should be like starts shaping up. Fortunately, Sebastian and I had the same idea.

Everybody who is involved in a conference invests a lot of time, money and effort: Attendees, organisers, speakers, partners, the crew. And since everyone is giving so much, it’s your duty as organiser to make sure that everyone’s investment was worth it. Stick to your promises. Don’t screw with people’s expectations. Ensure everyone feels at home.

I’m still not sure how close we came to the conference we envisioned. But I know that we got one big thing we were aiming for: A wonderful night with wonderful people around us.

Enter #devone #

About a week after ScriptConf, I was summoned to a meeting room in our office at Dynatrace. Dynatrace wanted to do their own conference, on topics which are key to the day to day workflow of their development teams. It should be an event for Dynatrace employees, but open for everybody else to join and hang out with us and have a good time.

Since ScriptConf was such a success, the event’s organising team wanted to see what makes up a good conference. So we went through a tremendous list of all things big and little: The right selection of a ticket service, branding, catering, pricing, social media, agenda, breaks … we left out no little detail and had a very open talk on things to consider, as well as how much effort to put in. Both in time and budget. Organising a conference is not an easy task. That’s for sure. But it’s even harder when you have just four months available.

This Thursday, the first round of the “developer and ops” conference #devone took place. I was asked to MC the event, and to share the stage with friends and colleagues. And after the event, I can’t hold back with excitement and deep admiration I have for all those people involved. The crew did an outstanding job organising, spend so much care into all the little details, and made sure that this was one cozy, warm and fun party! I got so many good vibes, and it all felt like being back at ScriptConf again.

Dear Stefan, Irene, Hartwig and Katrin: You are simply amazing!

On to Script’18 #

Content-wise, #devone is like a necessary counterpiece to #scriptconf. Both events balance the topics relevant to the developer scene in Austria, while making sure that everyone gets a quality conference for a reasonable price. As said: Making the investment worthwhile.

After MC’ing #devone I can’t wait doing ScriptConf again, hopefully continuing the cycle that brings quality events directly to your door. Script’18, we’re coming!

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