Last week I attended jQuery Russia 2013 which was held at Digital October (my favorite venue) in Moscow. The conference was organized by a local HR company called ITmozg and they’ve done a fairly good job.
Dave Methvin, President of the jQuery Foundation, gave the opening keynote and a session on javascript and jQuery performance, which was really good. He called out Facebook for a pretty bad infinite scroll pattern, one that causes a forced layout on every scroll event.
He also mentioned that people often refer to jQuery being slow, and most of the time it’s not even jQuery’s fault:
This is not jQuery being slow, it’s that bad jQuery plugin.
Which sounds very familiar in the world of WordPress, themes and plugins. Dave also did a quick javascript profiling 101 using IE11 (which looks pretty amazing) and Chrome’s developer tools.
The other noteworthy session was Eric Mann’s about web sockets, and a pretty interesting Menehune library for jQuery.
Overall, the event was okay. Not great! But okay. I guess I was expecting more out of a $400 conference, stuffed with sponsors (including the stage), or maybe I’m just used to WordCamps :) Anyway, I met a bunch of folks, a few old friends. I didn’t stay for the after-party, but I’m pretty sure it was good.
Will I attend next year? Probably not.
