It took us a few days to wrap our thoughts after attending ArmadaJS, a small but exciting conference in Novi Sad, Serbia. People usually believe that bigger conferences are better, but the fact that this one was on a smaller scale meant that it was easer for us to closely connect and talk with other attendees.
In short, we had an amazing time, and in this post, we’ll share all the highlights and fun moments from the event!
Our general idea - present the "secret" behind Wasp's success
Wasp’s co-founders are usually the ones who get to give a speech about our open-source and full stack philosophy, but this time our founding engineer Mihovil had the honor of being the speaker. We wanted to test the audience’s response to his speech and to have a fun booth where people could have a blast by playing our custom made arcade and a game - a Super Mario-style performer where you have to run away from a scary monster.
The star of the show - Miho!
Miho is an experienced senior full-stack engineer with a passion for web, scuba diving, and learning languages.
We’d like to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to the conference photographer, who took some amazing shots of our team and also fought hard to win a plushie himself. Better luck next time! 😄
The name of Miho’s talk was “Crafting a full-stack framework's DX worth 15,000 GitHub stars”. Miho explained the design principles behind Wasp, which allowed us to create a full-stack framework with a great experience out-of-the-box, but still isn’t limiting and gives developers the freedom of doing this their own way when they want or need so.
In other words, if you want simplicity, with Wasp you get it out of the box, but if you want to take over the reigns, you can also do that by going one level deeper. The feature he described in depth was our auth system.
We won’t spill all the beans in this post, since we hope Miho to attend more conferences with his talk. If you want us to join your JS conference, let us know at [email protected] 🤓
We also had a chance to connect with others in the open source space who keep pushing web forward, and got some nice feedback and questions about Wasp as a framework and our plans for the future.
The arcade
We built this one from ground up ourselves, or to be more precise, Matija did. His best man created the hardware and Matija developed the original version of the game for his wedding. The idea was to get his best man to run away from the band members. The band members were expecting tips from Matija’s best man, and in order to escape, he had to pick up coffee boosters as he was running away. There were obstacles in the shape of brandy, so you know, the more brandy you have, the slower you are, and the band members take all your money in the end.
The arcade game is open source and written in Lua, so if you feel like giving it a shot, you can find it here. We took this game and changed the visuals, tweaked it a bit more, and now our Waspy is the star of the game, running away from a …. very unique monster. I won’t spoil all the fun in this post. 😎
The ones with the best scores got Waspy plushies, and a ban from playing the game again. That means the next day, a new group of people get to have more fun!
Winners from day 1 were successful in their mission to get a few versions of Waspy back home, to Croatia, while another one ended up in Serbia.
On day 2, we had 4 winners because the 3rd place players had the exact same score. (We decided not to take the consideration the fact that the difference was 0.5 between them, technically speaking one was a nanometer better than the other one.) We’re nice people, what can I say 😃
Thank you
We are really thankful to the whole ArmadaJS team for their amazing support and all the effort they put into this conference. We also want to thank all the attendees, especially the ones who were constantly keeping us entertained and the booth occupied. We hope you enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed yours!