JavaScript CraftCamp 2024 - #JSCC24

It's done! The JavaScript CraftCamp 2024 is over! Due to a lot of other commitments before the event, it has been really exhausting for me this time.

But before jumping into anything here: Thanks a ton for all the participants of this year's JSCC! I have never seen such a great spirit towards learning and crafting elsewhere. So glad this is working out.

There wasn't really much negative feeback this time and most of the people I asked could only share good memories. We definitely have a few things we can improve next time (especially a longer wrap-up), but overall, I'd say the JSCraftCamp has been a huge success.

There is always some trouble before the event to get everything done on schedule. I think we're always underestimating the time it takes for t-shirts: Find a sponsor, find a company to handle printing, check in with the sponsor, whether the price is still okay after getting offers for printing and after getting the sponsors approval: Find another company quickly because the printing company found out that they don't have the bandwidth to print it on time anymore.

Really, we all have to thank Sina for handling the t-shirt situation perfectly and getting not only the shirts but a lot more logistics organized prior to the event, despite any issues popping up! Also, she stayed around quite a while and came in early just that the participants could stay as long as possible. And she has over an hour to commute...!

Another big thanks to the Maiborn-Wolff team who helped us a lot during the event itself. It was extremely helpful to have a couple of people around who could help with the building, giving directions and jumping in with cables and other things when needed.

During the event itself, I'm trying my best to be a participant myself and hope not to have to organize too much on the fly. It's great to have people on the orga team like Bernd who can easily switch from participant to (hardcore) orga mode: He got people to go out with him to buy ice cream for everybody on both days, be around when food or drinks get delivered, making everybody aware of the situations and even getting us to find a just-in-time sponsor! Really glad to have him!

Improvements

We had a bit of a mix-up regarding the rooms and I feel bad about it since some sponsors were a little bit less exposed due to the naming of the rooms.

Another thing we did was reserving sponsors up to 5 seats. We didn't communicate well enough to have them reserve the seats through pull requests as well. In the end, it all went okay, but it was definitely something that could have caused bigger issues.

While I love having lots of sponsors and I'm happy for every company that sponsors any amount of money, I feel that sponsors who invest more money should have at least some incentive to do more. This could be more seats, more exposure (room names come to mind) or other things. We don't want to have one big sponsor ruling over everything though. It should still be a lot more community members than seats from sponsors.

There was some feedback from the location that something wasn't done correctly with the beverages. We should improve our checklist for the end of the event to make everybody happy after the event is over. Basically, the cleanup could have been done better.

Personal Conclusion

For me, organizing the JSCraftCamp feels like a great way to give back to the community that helped me out so much already. I have found friends and business partners through these meetups that started this and it feels great when people say thanks for helping them.

It's good to hear from participants that they really like this event and they want to have this more often. It seems to be inspiring and motivating for a lot of people here and I would definitely like to see more events like this. Maybe having this in a smaller scale throughout the year would be cool.

Still, organizing an event like the JSCC, getting the community involved, finding sponsors and keeping all of them hyped sometimes felt like a second job to me. As my time constraints are much more limited than they have been before becoming a parent, I'm unsure whether I can continue delivering a good job on the orga front. I'd love to see more people stepping up and trying to help us organize the whole thing. I can't even tell yet whether I have enough time next year.

Let's see whether I can at least do some online work for the community...! I'll start with some CSSBattle sessions and maybe someone will resurrect the Crafters vs Codewars at some point...?