Node won server-side JS by being first. Then the guy who built it got on stage and apologised for it. Then a 22-year-old rewrote it in a language most JS devs never heard of and claimed 3x the speed. Then Deno - after years of being ideologically pure - quietly added node_modules support and nobody talked about it.

This talk is the story of how we ended up with three competing JS runtimes, what each one is actually betting on, and why the ending isn't a winner - it's a boring standard that might matter more than all of them.

I run a dev community. Finding events and speakers was chaos.
So I built DevTalkPlanet.com in 200 hours:

Backend (my zone) Modern Frontend (new skills) User features: event listing, search, filters Speaker tools: Q&A, live polls, QR codes Organizer tools: event forms, banner generator

Now: 60 events, 100+ monthly users, growing organically.
Free and open-source.

We'll use it live during this talk.
Real commits, real learning, real product solving a real problem.

Right now you can build faster than ever. You have ‘Everything as a Service’; Hundreds of AI agents at your disposal with no workers' union. And JavaScript runs on virtually every internet connected device on the planet. Scary huh?

In this talk I’ll share practices I’ve seen work as an IC, a manager, and a manager of managers, and what remains important when zooming out from line by line implementation.

Luke Sargeant is an Engineering Lead at vega-alts.com - a Series A startup Building the Alternative in private markets.

I built ErrorScript: TypeScript with "Safe" Exceptions. Unhandled exceptions and dropped promises become part of the type system and raise compile-time errors.

It works. It feels native. And it probably shouldn’t exist.

This talk explores what ErrorScript reveals about how we model failure in code, how language design influences behaviour, and the trade-offs that make this feature unlikely to be adopted.