Fronteers 2014 – Day 1

7 pm

We got out of bed early, unprepared and newly awakened from a few hours sleep. Well, not really. We went to bed early and slept like babies, because we're getting old, and boring.

We arrived at Pathé Tuschinski, an old theater in the heart of Amsterdam, close to the Amstel river, where the water once gave life to the brewery’s now famous brew Amstel. The interior of the venue reminds us of the game Bioshock and we are just waiting for the splicers to come in the door and cut our heads off any moment now… 

And so it begins

We took up the challenge and pushed through the crowd to get the best seats for the 7th annual Fronteers conference, it was going to be epic!

Starting off with some CSS style lesson, apparently we are doing it wrong (surprise surprise) and we kept looking over our shoulders for the CSS police to come and take us away. They didn’t.

The adventure continued with a walkthrough of how to work with front-end development at Etsy. They have a really good way of getting an overview of their codebase, which we would could really use in our huge app, seriously, it’s huge (Don’t believe us? Come work with us!).

Lunch!

Woll mysteriesly disappeared during lunch but later showed up at the venue. We were ever so worried. Good thing he's an olympic swimmer.

With full stomachs (and wet clothes) we continued

We got really excited about the great talk about HTML5 game framework Phaser (www.phaser.io) which seems to make it really easy to create 2d games.

The sessions ended with some introduction to offline first development (apparently, progressive enhancement is no more). Alex Feyerke introduced us to Hoodie, which makes it really easy to keep information offline until you get connection and can sync everything to the cloud (omg! OMG!).

The speaker issue

Seriously, only 3 out of 18 speakers are women, this is a real problem and we need to find a way to introduce more women to speak during these kinds of events. NordicJS for example had a good mix of genders, why should it be so hard?

The evening

We started the evening with a really bad meal, in fact it was so bad that Woll ended up in the canal again (surprise surprise). It ended better though, we got a kind of sightseeing around the streets of Amsterdam that really got to our heads (x_x).

Will we survive the night? Stay tuned and you will find out!