Last Saturday I attended SwissJeese, the first Swiss tech conference dedicated exclusively to JavaScript. It was co-organised by @bdufresne and @shvi from JSGeneve and JSZĆ¼rich respectively. Thanks to the sponsors, it was complitely free (as in beer) to attend and there were even food and drinks included.
The one day conference started in a casual ambiance with coffee and croissants. The sessions were opened with some catching lightning talks, among them one by the creators ofĀ movies.io, a service for finding movies online recently discussed on hackernews. After that, @jviereck showed us pdf.js, a free (as in speech) library for displaying PDF's. I was fairly impressed by the state of the PDF reader developed by Mozilla: not only is it a free alternative to plugin based or built in readers but also does it not limit creativity when it comes to dealing with PDFs. @jviereck showed us some amazing demos that render PDFs coverflow style and even take them to the third dimension. You can find the demos here.
In the afternoon I got the honor to give a talk myself. It was about the YUI app framework that we use in some projects here at Liip. You can find my slides here. Given that this was the first talk I ever gave I was quite nervous upfront. However the nervousness vanished once I started and the talk turned out pretty well.
The breaks between the talks were bridged in a refreshing way by our toastmaster @shvi who practiced for his big performance as such at FromTheFront later this year.
Later that afternoon we got our hands dirty with Sencha Touch 2 guided by @akosma. We also got a look behind the scenes of webdoc, built by @julbmann and his crew. Webdoc is an awesome web application that helps people creating rich media content. The sessions were closed by @pilif, the star of the conference, who already spoke at JSConf EU. He gave an amusing but nevertheless heavily educational talk about the evolution of character sets.
After this well organised conference we let the day fade out at the beautiful āAareā with a few beers and many interesting discussions with open minded people. I think I speak for all attendees when I say āA big thank you to the organisers ā I'm looking forward to SwissJeese 2013ā.