Outreachy gives us a grant of up top $500 for traveling, be it for a conference, a workshop, a course, anything that has something to do with the Open Source Community. My mentor, Mike Taylor, was going to come to BrazilJS and asked me if I wanted to use my travel allowance for it, I agreed and went to the conference that happened in Porto Alegre.
BrazilJS
BrazilJS is self proclaimed as the “biggest Javascript conference in the universe” and roughly 1.500 people attend it every year in Brazil. My mentor, Mike Taylor, lived in Brazil for sometime in his life and knows how to speak Portuguese really well. He has been attending the conference for the past years and this year was no exception. Since I live in Sao Paulo, Outreachy gives a travel allowance, and in my work I use a lot of Javascript, it made a lot of sense for me to go with, and I did.
Mike was going to give a talk there about “weird APIs” and Mozilla itself was going to have a booth about WebVR and A-Frame, so I went as a Mozilla employee.
The conferece went on for two days and I watched a lot of great talks. The ones that I enjoyed the most were the WebVR ones “3D Experiences + The Web Platform” and “A-Frame 101”. The first one was mostly just a presentation of stuff that you can do with three.js, A-Frame and Web Assembly and the second was an introduction and showcase of A-Frame and it’s features.
A-Frame
I have to make a section only for A-Frame in this blog post, because it is too awesome.
As I understand it, A-Frame is a wrapper around the three.js framework and makes it super really easy to build virtual reality experiences with just HTML and JavaScript. The feature that left me awed was the inspector one. Basically, when you have an A-Frame scene in a webpage, you can add the inspector feature to it just my injecting some JavaScript to the page. When you open it, you can press Alt+Shift+i and instead of the browser inspector opening up, the A-Frame inspector will.
The A-Frame inspector is a simple yet powerful 3D modeling tool for the browser. You can add, move, change, update, animate and do a lot of cool stuff to 3D models and scenes directly from the browser.
I will add links to all this in the related links section for this post.
Conclusion
BrazilJS was my first ever conference. If I’m being really honest, I have a really hard time just staying put and watching talks, but I really don’t think that a conference is all about that. Of course the talks are really important, but what I brought home with me that I treasure more than the talks that I watched were the people that I met, the stories that I listened to, the experiences that I shared with everyone that I met there and of course the t-shirts that I got.
Related Links
The illustration at the top was made by my good friend @onunes