Front-End Day 2019: Our Impressions

When a team understands the value of knowledge, it becomes clear why knowledge-sharing events are so important.

Once again, our lovely colleagues took the initiative and organised an internal conference - Front-end Day. On that Saturday, everyone from our company (regardless of their current role) was invited to listen to eight amazing lectures about trending topics in Front-end Development.

The preparations for this event had taken a couple of months. Our contributors’ organisational skills were put to the test as they needed to create the concept of the conference, assist all the speakers in preparing their lectures and take care of small details which made us feel like we were attending a commercial conference.

Q&A session with Vladan and Maja

The speakers received a warm welcome from the guests who actively participated in Q&A sessions after each lecture. This kind of atmosphere encouraged collective knowledge-sharing and idea exchanging which was the initial idea behind the conference in the first place.

Read what our colleagues have said about this event:

Marina Tatic - What’s New in HTML 5.2?

“I saw FE Day as an excellent opportunity to learn new things. At the same time, this was the first public conference where I shared my knowledge with my colleagues. The topic I was talking about was HTML 5.2. During the lecture, I talked about new elements and functionalities such as dialogue, the validity of style element in the body element, about use of more main elements, and I also mentioned some new attributes. Then, I talked about the changes in the new version of HTML, as well as about removed functionalities, that is the functionalities that are no longer valid.

During the day I learned some new things by listening to different lectures, which motivated me to continue researching and learning. I think that these kind of events are useful because we can hear a lot about new technologies, tools, and ways how to improve and make our work easier. Also, this conference is a great opportunity to spend some quality time with my colleagues and get to know each other.”

Nikola Dragan - What are React.js “nutrition facts”?

“FE day is an excellent opportunity for us, front-enders, as well as for those who are in love with front-end to listen to some new interesting topics in the field of front-end development. Also, this is a great chance for all of us to be speakers in a familiar environment. It was much easier for me to talk in front of my colleagues I work with every day.

Preparing the topic I was going to talk about was not problematic to me, because I knew from the very start what I wanted to talk about and what topics I wanted to research, so everything ran smoothly.”

Ivana Tesanovic - the guest

“How to say I’ve had a good time and not sound cheesy? Even though I am a back-end developer, I’ve heard some amazing things at the FE Day Conference. As I have been working in JavaScript for quite some time, this was a good opportunity for me to wrap my head around the basics which this programming language relies on. Besides that, I’ve got to learn about some new stuff happening on the Internet and dive into new JS frameworks.

Conferences like these hold a special place in my heart because they make me jump out of my comfort zone and explore new things I still haven’t got a chance to explore. You can never be educated enough – so, whenever I see or hear something that seems interesting, I give my all to be a part of it.”

Nenad Percic - the guest

“FE Day was amazing!

As a developer who builds applications that run in a browser, I was really curious to see what our colleagues prepared. I am really happy to say that I acquired a couple of new concepts from the talks which can be easily applied to improve the performance of an application or to bridge a specific gap on the project.

Every talk was exactly on the point, especially the ones given by the colleagues that felt anxious about giving their first talk and stepping out of their comfort zone. It was obvious that they had put a lot of effort into preparing great and valuable sessions for everyone.

I can’t wait for the next conference and I hope it will gather around the new enthusiastic speakers willing to share their knowledge and ideas with others!”

Sladjana MIljanovic - the contributor and mystery speaker

“This event is very important to me especially because it started out as an event with one goal - to give us the opportunity to share knowledge. Although it started as an informal gathering, it now turned into a real conference. As someone who has visited many conferences abroad, I can proudly say that our conference is in line with many well-known conferences around the world. Maybe someone might think that I’ m not so modest and that this is not possible, but, trust me, it is :-)”

Aleksandar Jovanov - the contributor

“The conference was excellent. Not only did it fulfil me, but it exceeded my expectations! The speakers were absolutely amazing. Although I have 9 years of experience in software development, I learned something new from each one of them.

This conference is just two years old, but it is now obvious that  it will move the boundaries of this company and grow into something amazing in the years to come.”

Maja Neducic - the contributor

“There is no greater happiness than to make other people happy and help them be better at what they do.

This kind of knowledge sharing event gives us the opportunity to take some new roles we haven’t had a chance to play so far (such as an organiser, a speaker), and therefore help us further develop our soft-skills and improve professionally.”

We believe that encouraging learning in our company help us grow together as a team. This conference helped our colleagues reflect upon why they fell in love with Front-end development in the first place. And our colleagues from different teams had the opportunity to hear more about best-practices, new concepts and trends in Front-end from their highly experienced colleagues.

It was a pleasure to be in a group of learning enthusiasts who keep investing their time in educating themselves and becoming professionals at what they do. And who knows, as Aleksandar said above, maybe one day Front-end Day will move beyond the walls of our company.

Until then, we’re looking forward to many Team Boosts sessions and the next year’s FE-Day conference!