Tuesday saw the first event for London Burns Sheehan of 2019: Trending.js. Hosted by Bulb in the Second Home offices, we were joined by around 100 of London’s tech scene, with guest speakers from both Bulb and Skyscanner. An evening centered around JavaScript specifically, it was great as a JavaScript specialist team to organize the event, meet you all and ultimately understand what is important to you, the developers!

A technology company who are revolutionizing the energy industry as the first energy company to receive B-corp status, Bulb were up first. They volunteered two speakers to deliver JavaScript talks.

Luke John has been the Lead Engineer of Bulb’s design system team for the past year, and his talk on ‘Sparking Joy with TypeScript’ was a practical guide to TypeScript patterns and practices that bring happiness and productivity. Matyas Buczko was up directly after – an ex-Skyscanner engineer himself - his talk, dubbed ‘What We Do in the Shadows’, focused on Bulb’s new shadow testing and the tooling they are building around it. Having heavily distributed a marketing research questionnaire a few months back on what topics the JS community were most interested in seemed to pay off, as the engagement of the crowd during these talks and consequent interest in questioning both Luke and Matyas during the Q&A session to discuss their topics in further detail, was evident.

Both Luke and Matyas deserve a special shout out for incorporating A* usage of relevant meme’s and gifs throughout their slides also (my personal favourite being the ‘Debt collection’ slide using the image of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction!).

After a short break - in which copious amounts of beer and pizza were distributed – we returned to our seats (or in some cases elongated leaning positions) to continue with the talks, where Skyscanner were up next.

A household name in their own right, Skyscanner’s tech teams handle large scale, complex problems, reaching over 80 million active users on a monthly basis.

Dmitry Zeldin’s, Designing an Extensible Internal Tooling Platform talk, centred around enhancing the developer experience utilising micro front-end architecture to create an extensible, reusable platform for hosting internal tools. I have recently been badgering a couple of my developer contacts to explain the concept of micro front-ends, and Dmitry’s ability to convey intricate concepts to both technical and non-technical members of the crowd was impressive (and super useful!).

Stepping in for Mark Allen who unfortunately couldn’t travel from Barcelona that day, and concluding the evenings talks was Nima Soroush, Senior Software Engineer, who’s talk on Modern Web Front-End Testing revolved around the concept of building a reliable and stable web front-end testing stack.

After a final Q&A session in which Dmitry and Nima were further quizzed on their respective topics, the event was a wrap!

At the post event drinks in Shoreditch’s Big Chill, and in conversations with several attendees since, the event seems to have served its purpose – to integrate ourselves with the tech community and get closer to those we speak to every day! As mentioned by Chris Spranklen (Burns Sheehan’s London Director) in the introduction to the event, our aim is to differentiate ourselves from the thousands of other recruitment agencies you all have access to, by being knowledgeable, honest and unique!

Ultimately, we as a team would love to thank both Bulb and Skyscanner for contributing to the evening with the location itself, and the company merch which was floating around; to our speakers for such thought out and engaging talks and for everyone who attended, asked questions and participated in what I hope you’ll agree was a great evening!

If you want to be involved in our next event, or are hiring/looking to be hired within the London JavaScript space, then I’d love to hear from you!  riannon@burnssheehan.co.uk

 

Written by Riannon Dodd