SSJS Devcamp organized by DevMeetings.pl

I have always liked lightweight events, like BarCamp, and have tried to attend most of locally organized ones. At the beginning of this year I have taken part in Poznań Code Retreat that was really great and intense coding experience, and I would love to take part in another one.

In June I have received an invitation to a Server Side Javascript R&D Camp organized by DevMeetings.pl. It was advertised as a three days long, advanced and practical developers meeting in a nice hotel in countryside. It didn’t take me long to accept the invitation and I was eagerly waiting for it.

About twenty developers arrived on Thursday evening. For the first two days we worked in 4-5 people teams researching different topics: security, performance, NoSQL databases, integration, tools and practices. I worked on db team and will describe the results in some following post. On each day’s evening each team presented theirs results. This introduced a little pressure and made people work hard, as no one would like to present nothing…

On Sunday, our final day, each team was given the same task: implement simple twitter clone using some of the technologies we have worked with. We started at 10am and the deadline was dinner at 2pm. I, together with Bartek and Bernard used RingoJS deployed on AppEngine, and the results are visible here. I think it is quite impressive that now we have technologies and tools that allows us to build such things in a rather short time span. But to be honest we could use Python instead of RingoJS and there would be even less work to do (appenginejs is rather incomplete and needed some patches).

And again, after dinner each team showed theirs app, each was crowd beta-tested and the results of the camp was discussed. Sadly I had to leave before the conclusion but I have a feeling that SSJS was not voted as production-ready Java replacement… But more on that later.

I would like to thank the organizers and all the great attenders, I had a great time and learned a lot about today’s hot technologies. See you next time!