Our impression of Meet.js Summit 2018

Meet.js Summit is one of the biggest JavaScript Conference in Poland. It’s a great opportunity to join about 500 frontend developers interested in JavaScript development. The event covers different frontend topics like architecture, node.js, reactive programming or JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React or Vue.

The organization of Meet.js Summit 2018

The event was held at Poznań International Fair what was a brilliant idea because of the location. The place is a real communication hub in the city, so it’s easy to get there from a different point of Poznań as well as from other cities because of its proximity to the Central Train Station.

The place in itself was awesome! A lot of space and modern and comfortable conference room.

In addition to the obvious things like the ability to drink some coffee, tea or water and talk to other JavaScript passionates, thanks to sponsors, you could take a photo with cosplayers or win a drone during the coffee breaks.

As Merixstudio, we also decided to support Meet.js Summit 2018 and we showed up as a sponsor with our stand. To make it more interesting and entertaining we prepared a game for participants. JBL headphones were the prize. To get it you had to collect the highest score in the Snake game that we’ve created for one of our clients from Belgium some time ago. It was crazy fun!

Besides the small delay in registration, every organization-related stuff wents smooth.

The talks

The lectures which I remember most were the ones cover Machine Learning. There was up three speeches on this topic.

During Szymon Frąszczaks presentation called “Pros and cons of integrating machine learning models to the frontend side”, he focused on the solution integrates a few machine learning models on the client side with AMD JavaScript modules in the production environment. He pointed out the pros, cons, and limitations of using ML on a site.

The second speech about machine learning gave Patryk Omiotek. He was talking about TensorFlow.js - a JavaScript library which allows build and train models from scratch or run pre-existing model right in the browser or under Node.js. Omiotek showed how and where is good to use TensorFlow.js in Machine Learning.

The last machine learning-related lecture that I really like was the one where face-api library was presented. It was called “How the Browser Sees Your Face” and was led by Mirosław Ciastek. He gave us a brief overview of face detection concepts and showed some popular methods of it. Also, Ciastek compared face-api with openCV. for sure, JavaScript libraries are not as efficient as C or Python libraries, but nowadays devices are so efficient that you can detect faces using just browser.

However, Meet.js Summit is not only about machine learning. The conference covered such topics as ReactXP, applications scaling using microservices approach or styling React app with css-in-js library.

Anna Konopka was talking about how the multi-platform development looks in reality and answered questions like “is being JavaScript-speaking enough to build mobile apps?”, “what can go wrong?” and “is it worth the fight?”.

Jakub Holak tried to show us that micro frontends is much more than a buzzword and it will become an important architectural approach.

Przemek Suchodolski introduced us to css-in-js approach and explained why BEM is not enough in term of big React app. In a nutshell, he presented pros and cons of using css-in-js library.

These were talks that I enjoyed the most.

The atmosphere

The conference was just awesome! A lot of people like me - passionate about JavaScript development. It was really great to talk with dev colleagues from other companies and other cities.

The atmosphere was very friendly, and the sponsor’s sands were creative and eye-catching.

See you next time

In a nutshell, the conference was very good! Amazing talks and great open-minded people. I would like to say thank you to all of the organizers and speakers as well for sharing their knowledge and experience.

For sure, it’s one of the events that’s worth to participate in. I’m looking forward to the next edition of Meet.js Summit as well as other conferences like that!