See you in 2023!

We had a blast in 2022 and we were super happy to see you all in person again after 3 years. So based on this experience, we’re coming back in 2023 with a two-day event, a format that used to be our way to go in a pre-pandemic world.

Tickets are available on our ti.to page. If PayPal is not your preferred payment method, you can also pay by invoice. For more information drop us a line at welcome@jsheroes.io.

Looking forward to seeing you all back in Cluj, on the 18th and 19th of May 2023!

Meet our speakers

Alena Nikolaeva Product DesignerGitHub

Alena Nikolaeva Product Designer @ GitHub

Accessibility-first Frontend Engineer and Product Designer focused on accessible and inclusive experiences on the web.

Talk: Proven ways to make your website accessible in 2023
Web accessibility communities and tools keep evolving with time: if in 2009 we would refer to accessibility being tied to the HTML and some of the good practices widely known, in 2023 the picture is broader.

Accessibility in 2023 touches many aspects: copywriting, content creation, UX testing and interviews with people with disabilities, accessibility-first design systems and specs are being created by design teams. Developers are required to be involved not only in keeping up to date with best practices in modern frameworks, but also be ready for a11y testing (end-to-end, unit, and manual with assistive technology), performance, security. More clients and project managers are aware of accessibility and demand high standards. At the same time, it has never been easier to get accessibility training and establish bullet-proof practices in teams.
Carmen Popoviciu Systems EngineerCloudflare

Carmen Popoviciu Systems Engineer @ Cloudflare

Carmen is an emoji hyper-user disguised as a web developer in real life. She enjoys building things on the web and does exactly that on the Pages team at Cloudflare. If you are ever stranded on a remote island and have only three attempts to recover your master password, the secret key code is “dance”.

Talk: Machine Learning at the Edge
A few years ago, developing Machine Learning with JavaScript would have seemed like a daunting and far fetched thing, and yet, libraries such as TensorFlow.js changed everything and made it all possible. Similarly, edge computing has been on its own trajectory to expand the JS ecosystem boundaries. With JS serverless functions now running at the edge, JavaScript developers have access to unprecedented tooling to express their creativity.

In this talk we will explore how all these tools can be combined together to further expand the ecosystem, and enable JavaScript developers to run Machine Learning at the edge. We will discuss what such a system would entail, its benefits, limitations, and the performance aspects of it. We will also walk through some real-world use cases that would benefit from such an approach, and do a live demo of some sample applications to better exemplify these concepts, and hopefully inspire you.
Charlie Gerard Senior Developer AdvocateStripe

Charlie Gerard Senior Developer Advocate @ Stripe

Charlie is a senior developer advocate at Stripe, a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and the author of a book about TensorFlow.js. In her spare time she explores the field of human-computer interaction and builds side projects using machine learning, AR/VR, hardware and creative coding. When she’s not coding, she likes to spend time outdoors, read, and try things she’s never done before.
David Khourshid FounderStately.ai

David Khourshid Founder @ Stately.ai

David is a software engineer who loves playing piano and is passionate about animations, state machines, cutting-edge user interfaces, and open-source. Previously at Microsoft, he is now the founder of Stately, a startup focused on making even the most complex application logic visual and accessible to developers and non-developers alike.
Debbie O'Brien Senior Program ManagerMicrosoft

Debbie O'Brien Senior Program Manager @ Microsoft

Debbie is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft and has over 10 years experience in Frontend development. She has worked as a Tech Lead and consultant for many important clients with various technologies and often with a strong focus on performance, static sites and testing.

She has lead teams both in house and remotely as well as giving workshops and training. She has many years of experience as a mentor for online learning platforms, Treehouse and OpenClassrooms as well as the Google Developer Expert program.

Debbie is a Google Developer Expert in web technologies, GitHub Star Alumni and Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, an Auth0 Ambassador and Nuxt Ambassador and previous Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in developer technologies.

Talk: Playing your tests wright
It’s time to play your tests wright. Let’s take a look at how to write good tests and cover some of the best practices for testing, choosing the right locators and more. Let’s make testing easy and fun by generating tests on user actions. Then lets explore some cool tips and tricks to help you write better tests.
Emmy Cao Developer AdvocateWix

Emmy Cao Developer Advocate @ Wix

Hi! I’m Emmy and I’m a Developer Advocate at Wix. I started coding because of my childhood video game obsession, and taught myself web development while studying psychology in college. I love web development because a site on the internet feels like a house in a town - it’s fun seeing what spaces exist for people to visit! Outside work hours, I love longboarding, playing guitar, and going to bookstores.

Talk: ADHD in the Digital World
Too many tabs open? Can’t focus at work? Is something wrong with me?

It’s not uncommon for people who spend a lot of time around computers to wonder if they have ADHD. Why is that and how can we manage it?

This talk will go over how ADHD brains are affected by technology, and how to deal with the struggles those with ADHD in tech might face. Regardless of if you’re diagnosed, learning about ADHD will help us understand how we’re ALL affected by the digital world we’ve created.
Gil Tayar Principal Software EngineerMicrosoft

Gil Tayar Principal Software Engineer @ Microsoft

35 years of experience have not dulled the fascination Gil Tayar has with software development. His passion is distributed systems and figuring out how to scale development to big teams. Extreme modularity and testing are the main tools in his toolbelt, using them to combat the code spaghetti monster at companies like Wix, Applitools, and at his current job as software engineer at Microsoft.

In his private life, he is a dad to two lovely kids, an avid reader of Science Fiction (he counts Samuel Delany, Robert Silverberg, and Robert Heinlein as favorites) and a passionate film buff. (Stanley Kubrick, Lars Von Trier, David Cronenberg, anybody?)

Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t answered the big question of his life—what’s better, static or dynamic languages? But he’s working on it.

Talk: Towards a simpler JavaScript ecosystem
The history of the JavaScript ecosystem can be described as a move from a simple ecosystem with no tooling (just write the code and F5!) in the 90s, towards the current wave of massive tooling which nobody understands but which helps us mitigate the deficiencies in browsers and the internet.

Are we stuck there? Writing code for a dynamic language that needs no compiling, and yet surrounding ourselves with extremely complex tooling that we must have to develop significant software? I believe we don’t.

I aim to bring a vision that returns full circle to an ecosystem with little to no tooling. It shows that with modern technologies like import maps, web bundles, the type annotations proposal, 103 Early Hints, and others, we can bring back the simplicity of the early ecosystem, while not sacrificing the advantages of the current one.

This talk presents this vision, and describes the technologies and techniques that enable this return to simplicity.
Jani Eväkallio Founding Engineerverb.ai

Jani Eväkallio Founding Engineer @ verb.ai

A web engineer with a passion for building rich, collaborative, real-time web applications. Open Source author, comedian, improviser and once an aspiring novelist, these days Jani is building AI-enhanced text editing tools to help others, and himself, write better.

Talk: Building AI-powered user interfaces
As web engineers, we build user interfaces that make using our products simple, understandable and delightful. Over the years, we’ve built a toolkit of frameworks, patterns and practices to do so.

In the next few years, more and more products will be built on top of Artificial Intelligence technologies, such as generative models like OpenAI’s GPT-3. In this world, which of our tools will remain helpful, and which problems will require new solutions?

In this talk, I’ll explore some of the challenges our existing frameworks and mental models have in the age of generative AI. I’ll also introduce novel ways of thinking about user interfaces that we’ve discovered while designing and building verb.ai, an AI-powered web application for serious writers.
Jason Lengstorf HostLearn With Jason

Jason Lengstorf Host @ Learn With Jason

Jason Lengstorf is the host of Learn With Jason, where he helps tech companies connect with developer communities through better devrel strategy and media. He’s trying his very best to follow his own advice. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Jeffrey Lembeck Senior EngineerCatchpoint

Jeffrey Lembeck Senior Engineer @ Catchpoint

Jeff Lembeck is a Senior Engineer at Catchpoint where he develops and maintains WebPageTest. In his spare time, he enjoys playing with his cats and chasing his dream of Mario Kart 8 dominance.
Kateryna Porshnieva Head of Developer RelationsVeriff

Kateryna Porshnieva Head of Developer Relations @ Veriff

Kateryna is an engineer from Ukraine with 9+ years in UI development and design. Currently, she is working on developer productivity and leading the front-end guild at Veriff.

She is passionate about accessible web, async work and making complex things simple. Apart from work, she is active in tech community, organises board game nights and known as a coffee snob.

Talk: Visualised guide to memory management in JavaScript
Liran Tal Developer AdvocateSnyk

Liran Tal Developer Advocate @ Snyk

Liran Tal is an award-winning software developer, security researcher, and open source champion in the JavaScript community. He’s an internationally recognized GitHub Star, acknowledged for his open source advocacy, and has received the OpenJS Foundation’s Pathfinder for Security for his work on Node.js security. His contributions to developer security education include leading OWASP projects, building supply chain security tools, participation in CNCF and OpenSSF initiatives, and authoring books such as O’Reilly’s Serverless Security. He leads the developer advocacy team at Snyk.io and is on a mission to empower developers with better application security skills.
Maarten Van Hoof Developer Advocate & Front endiO

Maarten Van Hoof Developer Advocate & Front end @ iO

If I say ‘Use’, you say ‘the Platform’ ! Together with his fellow front end developers, Maarten raises iO’s HTML, JavaScript and CSS bar to a whole new level. Proficient with tools such as Vue.js, Nuxt.js and OpenAPI and many others in his proverbial tool belt, he builds for a high performant, accessible and user-friendly web. Next to grinding keys, he’s also a passionate tattler about how Open Source software should get more recognition, as it is the cornerstone of our current-day digital society.

Talk: Container Queries: The next step towards a truly modular CSS
Modular, componentized frameworks and libraries are more popular than ever, but currently screen size is the only dimensional constraint to which a web design can adapt to. Luckily for us, great things are a foot.

Container Queries, which allow you to style elements based on their ancestors dimensions, a feature requested by many since the advent of component-based front-end architectures met the principles of responsive webdesign, is finally in active development.

In this talk, Maarten will explain what Container Queries are and show you how each component can adapt its design to the dimensions of its container. Join us on our journey towards a more modular CSS!
Matan Kushner Engineering LeadTenkai

Matan Kushner Engineering Lead @ Tenkai

Matan is an Engineering Lead at Tenkai, and the Lead Maintainer of Starship, based out of Tokyo, Japan. He is passionate about making libraries and tools, making development delightful, easy, and accessible. In his free time, Matan loves bouldering, hiking, boardgames, video games, and watching anime.

Talk: Building Offline and Real-Time Applications - The Magic of CRDTs
Over the last decade, Google Docs dethroned Microsoft Word, Figma overtook Sketch, and Slack has nearly replaced email within teams. What makes these all-star experiences stand out? Real-time and offline capability. In this talk, we’ll deconstruct and understand the state-of-the-art technology powering many of these experiences: CRDTs.
Matthias Le Brun Lead Front-End Managerswan.io

Matthias Le Brun Lead Front-End Manager @ swan.io

Co-lead Front-End Developer @ swan.io, co-creator and podcast host @ putaindecode.io and co-organizer @ Paris.JS.

Talk: Leveraging (algebraic data) types to make your UI rock solid
As we always want to push the envelope and manage more and more on the front-end, our UI code code grew in complexity in the last few years. All of our modern application deal with three big challenges: optionality (is my data there or not?), fallibility (did my operation succeed?) and asynchronicity (when do I have my data?). Inspired by how typed functional languages treat those, we’ll see how we can leverage TypeScript to deal with them and make a whole category of issues disappear, so that we can focus on the essential parts: making great, accessible interfaces.
Nicolò Ribaudo Open Source DeveloperIgalia

Nicolò Ribaudo Open Source Developer @ Igalia

I’m a developer who loves open source and JavaScript. I work at Igalia, where I help push the web forward, and I maintain Babel — the JavaScript compiler. I’m also a TC39 delegate and I’ve helped developing different JavaScript proposals over the years. When offline, I’m a math student in Turin, Italy.

Talk: JavaScript Modules: Past, Present, and Future
For decades, JavaScript developers have relied on a multitude of module systems to organize and share code. But in 2015, ECMAScript finally introduced built-in standard semantics for modules, providing a long-awaited solution for the language. While ECMAScript modules have quickly become a popular format for writing code, most published code is still compiled to a single bundle or to a legacy module system.

The TC39 committee, which designs the ECMAScript language, is actively exploring this design space: are there any missing functionalities compared to previous systems? Do JavaScript developers need any capabilities that the language does not currently provide? What problems do ECMAScript modules currently cause?

This talk will walk you through the answers to those questions and show you current developments, giving a sneak peek at possible future modules features!
Simona Cotin Engineering ManagerGoogle

Simona Cotin Engineering Manager @ Google

Simona Cotin is an engineering manager on the Angular team, where she focuses on the core framework and tooling.
Tierney Cyren Principal Developer AdvocateTwilio

Tierney Cyren Principal Developer Advocate @ Twilio

Tierney is a Principal Developer Advocate at Twilio, where they spend their time working with various product teams on improving developer experience. In Tierney’s spare time, they enjoy playing video games with friends, watching YouTube, and riding their ebike around Manhattan.
Trine Falbe Ethical Innovation & Design consultant

Trine Falbe Ethical Innovation & Design consultant

Trine has pioneered the UX world with her thoughts on responsible design and ethical UX. She is an entrepreneur and independent consultant, and her clients come to her for her expertise in responsible innovation, ethical design and UX.

As the co-author of The Ethical Design Handbook and the founder of the Ethical Design Network, she continues to push and promote ethical design as a way forward for the digital industry.

Talk: Ethical Design for Developers
With great power comes great responsibility. And we all know that developers hold GREAT power!

Choosing to use our powers for good might be easier said than done. That’s where ethical design comes in.

In this talk, Trine Falbe will walk you through the principles of ethical design and show you some ways that developers can use the principles to build better, more ethical products products. Products to be proud of. Products we want to put our name on. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?
Zach Leatherman Open SourceNetlify

Zach Leatherman Open Source @ Netlify

Zach is a builder for the web with Netlify. He created the Eleventy site generator and is still fixated on web fonts. His public speaking résumé includes talks in eight different countries at events like Jamstack Conf, Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, CSSConf, and The White House. He is an emeritus of Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and still helps out with NebraskaJS.

Our support crew for 2023

Anjana Vakil MC

Anjana Vakil MC

A chronically curious teacher-turned-developer, Anjana is a polyglot software engineer & public speaker who spreads the joy of coding at events worldwide. She`s an alumna of the Recurse Center & Outreachy and an avid karaoke enthusiast.
Mădălina Țânțăreanu Sketch Artist

Mădălina Țânțăreanu Sketch Artist

Mădălina is a Romanian illustrator living in Berlin, Germany. She’s been working with us since the first edition, creating live sketches for each talk during the event. Check out some of her work from past editions in our special facebook album.

And our awesome ambassadors

An amazing group of people who said yes to the challenge of working with us at making JSHeroes awesome!

Andrei Antal Ambassador

Andrei Antal Ambassador
Benedek Gagyi Ambassador

Benedek Gagyi Ambassador
Ioana Chiorean Ambassador

Ioana Chiorean Ambassador

Ioana is an engineer manager flavored in communities, and devrel, that has more than 12 years of experience in tech with a specialization in mobile apps and web. Besides her daily job, she dedicates her time to building tech communities and improving the access to education. She is the Module Owner for Mozilla Reps, one of the alumna of MozTechSpeakers, and stands as an ambassador for CodeWeek at the European Commission.

In her free time, she contributes to Open Source, tech or sports events, and different volunteering programs. all these while enjoying a coffee or a good wine.
Jeremias Menichelli Ambassador

Jeremias Menichelli Ambassador

He developed interest in the web back when dial-up modems were the fastest thing on the planet. Now, he has more than a decade of experience building web products of all kinds and lately working in design systems, performance, education and community.

He’s currently the Lead Engineer of the Design System team at New Relic.
Sara Vieira Ambassador

Sara Vieira Ambassador

10 years of pushing the boundaries

This year we want to shift our attention to the decade of progress in the world of web development. Back in 2013, we went through a period of rethinking practices as frontend development took off and became one of the most crucial disciplines in tech. Frameworks like: React, Angular or Vue, and their ecosystems now enter into their second decade of existence, while web capabilities and standards are increasingly more potent and versatile.

So in 2023, let’s celebrate the past 10 years, reflecting on the evolution of our tools and patterns, with the good and the bad that comes with this rapid evolution.

At JSHeroes, we always ventured outside the pure language ecosystem, so expect to see a variety of talks covering the entire landscape of web development and JavaScript as a universal programming language.

But of course, we will not neglect the human side of things, in our effort to paint a full picture for the development community in 2023.

An open-source community event

JSHeroes is a non-profit community-organized conference, held every year in Cluj, Romania. Our goal is to bring together JS and Web/Frontend development enthusiasts from all over the world for a two day event with: great talks, amazing networking and tons of fun. You bring your ideas and desire to learn, we provide the relaxed atmosphere and the good vibes.

We believe that the community and the open-source models are well suited for our core values: learning, teaching and knowledge sharing. Our mission is to inspire other communities with the concept of open-source events.

We’re publishing all data about this conference, in full transparency. We are also available at any time for inquires and we’re really looking forward to sharing our knowledge about organizing international events. This way, whenever a community wants to start something similar, they can build on our knowledge.

Ecma, JSHeroes mascot wearing a space suit

Event sponsors

These are the companies that support our event financially through the €3,000 standard package.
If you are interested in supporting us, check out our sponsorship brochure for more information.

Media partners

The communities that support our event

Venue and health safety

We are hosting the JSHeroes 2023 conference at the Grand Hotel Italia, Vasile Conta Street number 2, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

See directions on Google Maps.

The health and safety of our staff, partners, and event participants is our top priority. We are following the latest policies and procedures issued by our national and local health officials on preventing the transmission of COVID-19. Wearing masks is recommended, but not enforced. If you do not have a mask with you, we can provide one at the registration.

Meet the team

Ale Retegan

Ale Retegan Organizer
Alex Moldovan

Alex Moldovan Organizer

Alex is one of the founders of JSHeroes and coordinates the effort behind the content of each edition. During the event, he will occasionally pick up the microphone and introduce speakers, but he prefers to keep a watchful eye over the conference, to make sure everything is on time and the event is as smooth as possible.

He works as a Frontend Engineer at CodeSandbox, where he gets to practice his passion for both sides of the user experience vs developer experience dilemma.
Alex Paușan

Alex Paușan Organizer
Alexandra Mînzat

Alexandra Mînzat Organizer

Alexandra is a lovely “sunny” person, she’s our admin girl, on board with JSHeroes since 2017.

Her aim is to make sure everything is done on time, the speakers arrive and leave safely, and urgent matters are attended to during the entire conference week.
Ana Cojuhari

Ana Cojuhari Organizer
Anamaria Oros

Anamaria Oros Organizer
Claudia Țicle

Claudia Țicle Organizer

Claudia loves people and has a strong sense of curiosity. Believes that design and technology are changing the world. For 💙JSHeroes💙 she 🌔gravitates towards visual design and content usability.
Daniel Mocan

Daniel Mocan Organizer

Daniel mostly focuses on the JSHeroes local meetups, but during the conference gives a helping hand where it is needed. He is usually in charge of the JSHeroes Blood Donation campaign.

He works as Full Stack JavaScript developer, with React on the frontend and Node on the server side.
Eliza Nițoi

Eliza Nițoi Organizer
Melania Moldovan

Melania Moldovan Organizer
Oana Muntean

Oana Muntean Organizer
Oana Șipoș

Oana Șipoș Organizer
Vlad Ionescu

Vlad Ionescu Organizer

Vlad has been helping organize the event three years running, being the man behind the scenes. Vlad is also in charge of all social events/parties, so if you want to find out where to get a beer in Cluj, Vlad is your man. You can also come find Vlad if you want to talk about LEGO, basketball or video games.

He works as a Full-Stack Engineer at FanDuel, where he gets to have fun doing a bit of everything.