This year’s The Geek Gathering conference has just finished, the impressions have settled and we have received feedback from both attendees and speakers.

If the name still doesn’t sound familiar - The Geek Gathering is all about discovering new tricks and secrets about JavaScript, design, UX, cloud computing, databases, big data, Internet of things, Web application security, hybrid Web development and other cutting-edge software development topics. More details on its humble beginnings are available here. Mono was in charge of the content: we’ve been trying to bring world-class speakers to our part of the world, and according to the feedback, it appears that we did a good job.

The conference was opened by the man himself, Douglas Crockford. His talk, “The Better Parts” was one of those out-of-the-box experiences. Many of us swear by his book, and were simultaneously surprised and inspired by his views on the new features in ECMAScript 6. I still don’t have production-quality videos from this year’s conference, so here’s a good quality recording of the same talk he held at the neighboring conference just a month ago, and believe me, you don’t want to miss it.

I would dare to say that the rest of the conference was just as good. Let me mention just a few of talks / workshops I was able to attend. We plan to update the conference site with the presentations and videos as we receive them.

The conference started with a workshop day. Jef Claes and Tom Janssens gave us a great intro to event storming, a powerful technique for exploring complex business domains. They did really well - but don’t just take our word for it, see what Tom had to say after the workshop has ended. At the same time, our UX team was teaming with the guys from Inchoo, talking about building responsive applications. This was followed by Hrvoje and Igor covering EF, ASP.NET MVC WebAPI and AngularJS. Josip Franjkovic analysed common web vulnerabilities during his workshop, while Lovro Nola and the team from Machina covered market validation of game design ideas.

Talks were equally impressive: Andrew was taking a different view on the new stuff in Javascript, Anton talked on building async backends in Python, Hugo covered basics of Symfony2 and Rob closed the event with style - we learned a lot on Clojure, while laughing our heads off. And that was not nearly all of it - topics like user testing, Neo4J, cryptocurrencies, computational complexity, open source technologies for Azure, DDD, SignalR and many more were covered in depth.

It was really a privilege to host such an exceptional group of people, and next year we hope to introduce some important organizational improvements. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to let us know what we missed this time and what needs to covered in the future.

P.S. Just a couple of photos that illustrate the atmosphere in and around this years’s TGG.