Thunder Plains 2015
Last year I had a pleasure to attend and speak at awesome Thunder Plains conference in Oklahoma City.
I presented Aurelia Framework:
I really liked this conference. Especially, because instead of having more talks that I could count, there was only 15 sessions (selected out of over 300) divided into 3 tracks. Moreover, all speakers were passionate developers, and you could feel this during their presentations.
I had a pleasure to met John-David Dalton - creator of lodash, who use to work at Microsoft for Chakra team, and now is working for Microsoft Edge team. I really enjoyed his talk on JavaScript performance. I also met Kyle Simpson - the author of You Don't Know JS book series and awesome Pluralsight course: Advanced JavaScript. He presented inspiring keynote on choosing simplicity over easiness.
I also attended very good session - Maybe We Should Slow Down by Blaine Bublitz (author of over 400 npm packages). Blaine was convincing developers to think twice before contributing code, and publish only features they have high confidence about.
The coolest talk of the conference was JS in Near Space by Pawel Szymczykowski. I really recommend you to check it out. Pawel, together with his friends built a small space ship, powered by Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, and they are sending them into "Near Space", up to ~100 000 ft altitude (Boeing 737 flies at <40 000 ft).
Actually, I have seen all talks (in person, or on youtube), and all of them were well prepared. There was no single talk about which I could tell that speaker was not good, or not prepared. You can check them out here:
Thunder Plains is community event organized by 3 passionates - Vance Lucas, Jesse Harlin and Amanda Harlin - who did a really good job in taking care of everything. Congrats!