Nodeschool International Day

Node International Day was a global event, aimed at providing educational web events around the globe. The main goal is to learn Node.js and have fun with it. That’s why I started to look at the event and, quickly, more people got involved.

Organizing

Fábio was excited to join the team and we were ready to go. We started by answering the question “What do we like to see in a node event like this?”, and by defining the target audience: “Should we focus on beginners, intermediate or advanced Node.js users?”

We thought we could join both worlds and create an event where beginners could start to look at learnyounode and javascripting NodeSchool workshops and intermediate/advanced ones could just pick whichever workshop they want and form a team!

We planned a whole day with this in mind; we started to pick some interested universities interest and created some posters and stickers for the event. We also decide to have some talks, (that we called enLIGHTNING talks, due to their fast and informative nature), for which we invited some amazing speakers to talk about what people can do with Node.js in real life.

Also, we had some great news to share with the Lisbon Node community: we finally got a logo for NodeSchool Lisbon, thanks to Ruben Canhoto (@rubencanhoto) who came up with the amazing concept and design. The feedback from everyone was amazing and we finally got a logo that is both recognizable and beautiful.

Obviously, sponsors were needed in order to avoid costs and provide the best experience we could. YLD! provided an awesome venue, with capacity for 35 people near the center of the city. BOLD international and Landing.jobs gave us lunch and some snacks. Additionally, we had cool swag sponsored by YLD! and Landing.jobs.

The Day

Participants arrived at 9:20 am and the event began at 9:45 am. We were surprised by the quantity of people that showed up before the scheduled time and the amount of people that wanted to start learning Node.js! In fact, more then 60% of the attendees had never used Node.js before. Also worth mentioning is the fact that we had people from all around Portugal, not only from the Lisbon area.

Fábio did the intro to the event and, afterwards, most of the people started to look at the learnyounode and javascripting workshops. Some of them also picked functional javascript and learnyoureact and made teams. There was also one team whose goal was to use Docker with Node.js images and use the load balancer provided by nginx.

In the end of the day we had two groups of participants presenting the work they did during the day:

• A react todo list app by a 6-person team
• A Hapi.js application deployed with Docker that allowed for multiple instances to be spun up and reached behind a reverse-proxy.

Between the attendees talks and the enLighting presentations we had an overview of the TADHack 2015, which will be held on 13–14 June.

The enLIGHTNING talks where given by some amazing YLD! guys. First, we got to dive into some embedded systems stuff with Nelson where he also announced a Hackathon to be held in July. Then we had Thiago and Igor doing a demo on how to scrape the NodeSchool International Day website using Selenium; they also did a quick rundown on how to properly deploy the app on a DigitalOcean droplet.

For a one-day event, we considered that it was great! The main goal was successfully accomplished since we had so many people that wanted to have fun with Node.js! The feedback was really good (see meetup.com/require-lx), and people mentioned the great atmosphere created, providing a productive environment in which everyone could learn and increase their network. We can’t wait for next year’s NodeSchool International Day! Keep on learning!