The JavaScript saga continues... As the calendar turns to May, a new chapter unfolds for our ZurichJS community.

We're looking forward to welcoming you on Thursday, May 15th to the welcoming halls of Smallpdf for an evening of stellar talks and connecting with fellow JavaScript enthusiasts. Prepare for hyperspace!

Brace for:
- Talks from local JS Jedi Masters 🎤
- Networking with fellow developers 💻
- Food & drinks to power your coding journey 🍕

May the code be with you! Always. <3

Alex shares real-life lessons from his journey through multiple forms of self-employment — from freelancing and running a small agency to building and marketing his own product. You’ll get honest insights, practical tips, and a clear-eyed look at the ups and downs of each stage.

The core themes covered:

- Making the leap: transitioning from full-time employment to self-employment
- The ups & downs of self-employment, tips for success
- From client work to building your own product, a.k.a. ‘Living the dream’

Whether you're seriously considering quitting your job or just curious about what it’s really like to go independent, this talk is for you.


STRICH is a JavaScript library for real-time, 1D/2D barcode scanning in the web browser.

STRICH

Alex Suzuki

Solopreneur | Author of STRICH (Barcode Scanning for Web Apps) | Father of two

Carving your own path: a builder’s journey

Your application works great in development but what happens when real users flood in? Will it handle the load, or will it crash under pressure?
What You'll learn:

- What is load testing
- How to load test your application
- Understand the report that Gatling generate
- Get some load testing tips

Join me to see how Gatling help you to scale efficiently when your website need it the most

Load testing designed for DevOps and CI/CD

Gatling

Samir Akarioh

Developer Advocate @ Gatling

Load Testing with Confidence: Integration of load tests in CI/CD

Raycast lets you turn your workflow into keyboard-driven magic. In this quick talk, I’ll walk through how I built the official Smallpdf extension in a night:

- What makes a good Raycast extension
- The basics of the Raycast API
- How to build, test, and publish one
- Lessons learned from shipping a real tool

The Raycast extension for quick access to all core Smallpdf tools

Smallpdf Raycast Extension

Faris Aziz

Staff Software Engineer at Smallpdf | Conference Speaker | Workshop Instructor

Building Raycast Extensions: Fast, Useful, and Actually Fun

Zurich JS Meetup #5: May the Code Be With You

Swiss April? Never mind the showers, we're forecasting a light drizzle of JavaScript insights!

On Thursday, April 17th, we’re organizing the fourth edition of Zurich JS and we'll visit the cool Smallpdf office for the first time! 🎉

Live coding session combining various TypeScript concepts, like generics, pattern matching, tail-recursion, conditional type.

Thomas Rubattel

Frontend developer

Type-level programming in TypeScript

AI-powered agents are changing how we identify and fix accessibility issues on the web. This talk will explore how Allyship.dev uses AI-driven agents to scan, analyze, and detect accessibility violations in real time, helping developers and businesses stay compliant effortlessly.

What You’ll Learn:

- How AI agents navigate and audit websites for WCAG violations

- The role of automation in detecting keyboard traps, missing alt text, and poor focus management

- How AI agents analyze DOM changes to dynamically catch accessibility issues

- The future of AI-powered accessibility audits

Join us to see how AI is revolutionizing accessibility testing and making web compliance faster and smarter!

Aleksej Dix

Founder of Allyship.dev

Andriy Pokrovskyi

AI Content Creator | Full-Stack Dev | Flutter & Dart

How AI Agents Detect Accessibility Issues

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a foundational layer for enabling interoperable, AI-native systems. In this talk, we’ll explore how to implement MCP servers and clients in JavaScript, focusing on the core structure of the protocol and how to enable communication between models and tools. Through practical examples, you’ll learn how to serialize context, handle events, and wire up components that speak the same protocol. If you're building AI tools or looking to integrate with model-driven ecosystems, this session will help you get started with MCP the right way.

Victor Nitu

AI Engineer

Implementing MCP in JavaScript

Short practical example of integrating Bluesky comments into your Astro blog posts, featuring client-side rendered Solid JS.

Jens Rømer Hesselbjerg

Senior Software Engineer

Bluesky, Astro and Solid JS walks into a bar

The ZurichJS platform is evolving. We’ve been working on new features to make things smoother, smarter and a bit more fun. In this lightning talk, I’ll give a quick peek at where things are headed and what’s coming next. 

ZurichJS Platform

Bogdan Ilie

Creative Front-End Web Engineer | Design-focused

ZurichJS Platform: Looking Ahead

Zurich JS Meetup #4: April stands for AI

Let's keep the ball rolling!

On Thursday, March 20th, we’re organizing the third edition of Zurich JS!

Details are soon to follow, but we're happy to be hosted by Ginetta in their Zurich office!

For this edition, we have two engaging talks, as well as a quick lighting talk!

Unblock your productivity with Chrome Devtools and improve your developer life with every line of the inspected code.

Ewa Gasperowicz

Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Google

Chrome Devtools tips & tricks

Get ready to embark on a journey into the depths of TypeScript. We'll be exploring the often overlooked, yet powerful, features that lie beneath the surface of this versatile language.

But we're not just talking theory here – this exploration will be a hands-on experience. Each feature will be brought to life through real-world examples, all done in a live coding session. Join in as we shine a light on these secret TypeScript treasures and discover how they can elevate your coding skills to new heights. Recursive types, type permutations and a css validator written in typescript are just three of the cool topics we are going to cover during this talk.

Christian Wörz

Expert Fullstack Engineer 👨‍💻 | Microsoft MVP 🔷 (Web Dev & Dev Tools)

A Deep Dive Into Advanced TypeScript: A Live-Coding Expedition

We’ll explore how AI is moving beyond mere assistance to become a full-fledged partner in software creation. So it will be a quick glimpse how you can use metaprogramming or direct transpiling of pseudocode to transform the way you build and think about software.

Jan Hesters

CTO @ ReactSquad & SocialKit

A.I.D.D. (A.I. Driven-Development)

What's all the hype with 'Vibe Coding'? How did it help me ship ZurichJS at lightning speed ⚡

In this lightning talk, I'll share how I created the entire ZurichJS platform in under 2 hours using AI assistance. Turns out you don't need to be in a Silicon Valley garage with lo-fi beats playing to achieve the mystical "vibe coding" state!

I'll walk through my journey from skeptic to convert as I built a full-featured platform including:

- Next.js with those fancy animations everyone loves 💫
- Backend infrastructure that actually works
- Sanity CMS integration (because content is still king)
- SEO-optimized pages (Google still exists in the vibe coding era)
- Analytics tracking (because what even happened if you didn't track it?)

No fancy prompts or "I whispered to the AI and magic happened" stories, just honest reflections on how my development approach evolved and what I learned by embracing this trend to get pragmatic with shipping things fast.

For developers wondering if "vibe coding" is just another buzzword or actually useful, come hear from someone who's shipped real code both ways! 🚀

From Traditional Dev to the ZurichJS platform in 2 Hours: My Accidental Journey into 'Vibe Coding'

Zurich JS Meetup #3: Revitalizing JS spring season

We’re bringing together the best of both worlds: a beloved framework and a cool up-and-coming meetup, ZurichJS.

This Vue meetup will be hosted with love by GetYourGuide, in their Zurich office, just a 5-minute walk away from Zurich main station!

Not all forms are created equal. We'll explore the key differences that set them apart and discover how to drastically reduce development effort when traditional coding methods fall short.

Adam Berecz

Founder of Vueform

From Object to Interface—Serialized Forms with Vueform

A quick hands on demo of how to audit your website with Allyship and get it primed for the European Accessibility Act!

Accessibility Audits with Allyship

Let's quickly test our knowledge of JavaScript and get some reminders of its quirks.

JS Quickfire - a friendly pop quiz

Vue Meetup reboot

Let’s start the new year with a bang! On Thursday, February 6th, we’re organizing the second edition of Zurich JS!

For this edition, we have two confirmed talks, as well as an open lighting talk slot (a quick 3-5 min bit to share). If you’re interested, reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Accessibility isn’t optional—it’s essential. In this talk, we’ll showcase why accessibility matters

The future of Accessibility with the EAA (feat: Allyship)

Flying in from Thessaloniki, Greece, Evangelia will share insights on how serverless workflows simplify backend complexity, the practical challenges and best practices for integrating serverless APIs, and show a live demo of rapid prototyping with serverless tech

Evangelia Mitsopoulou

Founder of Evangelia

Reimagining Frontend Development in the Serverless Era

Zurich JS Meetup #2: New Year, New Talks!

Whether you're working or learning React, Angular, Vue, vanilla JS or even backend technologies like Node.js or Deno, this meetup is for everyone building for the web with JavaScript!

Join us on November 14th for this edition, hosted by novu ag, a talented web agency based in Zurich-Bern-Basel.

For this edition, we have two confirmed, engaging talks, as well as an open speaker slot. If you’re interested, reach out to Faris or Bogdan on LinkedIn. Following the talks, we’ll have a session for lightning talks, where attendees can share their insights in short 3-5 minute bursts.

We’ll cover real-life examples of how to handle complex data fetching scenarios using modern web tools.

Solving Real World Data Fetching Challenges with Next.js and TanStack Query: A Pragmatic Case Study 

Al is the next big thing. Machine learning models are interpreting the world and generative Al is taking over more and more of our tasks. And this makes us increasingly dependent on the big Al providers. What if we could use all this magic directly on our devices? Maybe even directly in the web platform, the largest platform for applications that has ever existed?
With WebAssembly and WebGPU, we have the tools to make all this possible.
It's time to get ready for some unexpected examples of how to use Al in the browser!

Nico Martin

Frontend Developer and Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies and AI

From ML to LLM: On-Device AI in the Browser 

Zurich JS Meetup Relaunch: Talks, Lightning Sessions, and Networking

Summer’s heating up, and so is ZurichJS.

On Thursday, June 19th, we’re bringing the sixth edition of ZurichJS to life with a server-sized dose of JavaScript energy. 🌞

This month, we’re tuning into the pulse of Node.js infrastructure and high-performance front-end frameworks. Expect:

• Talks that make sure you do not thrash the Node.js Event Loop 👊
• Front-end tricks to push your web performance to the max with Qwik ⚡
• Conversations with other JavaScript fans 🧠
• Good vibes and better ideas 🍻

Deploying Node.js at scale is an art mastered by few. The most common problem is an exhaustion of resources that allows the application to denial of service itself. The result is Node.js systems that are massively overprovisioned, wasting enormous amounts of computing and memory - keeping most of them idle.

In this talk, we will do some math, discover hard truths, and implement a fix.

Matteo Collina

Co-Founder/CTO @ Platformatic - Node.js TSC member - Fastify Lead Maintainer

Do not thrash the Node.js Event Loop

The bar for high-performing websites keeps rising, and it's a critical factor for both user experience and search rankings. While achieving good scores is possible, it often requires significant effort and ongoing maintenance.

In this talk, I'll show how Qwik makes it easy to achieve top web metrics, automatically, even as your application scales.

We'll dive into Qwik's optimizer, explore the power of resumability and JS streaming, and uncover how its reactivity system works to deliver blazing-fast web experiences.


Wout Mertens

Head of Product at StratoKit SA | Qwik Core Contributor

Qwik Go For 💯

Pro Zurich JS Meetup #6: June's server solstice

In this talk, we’ll explore building full-stack web applications powered by Astro, Astro Actions and Astro DB. We’ll start by discovering the basics of Astro, why and where it’s useful, and how to build a web applications with it. We’ll discover how to use Astro’s new default hybrid rendering mode to add API routes and dynamic server-side rendering to the application. Then we’ll dive into Astro DB, a simple, yet powerful ORM used to communicate between a LibSQL database and your Astro application. Also, Astro 5.0 has been released, we’ll round up the talk by looking at how we can combine all of these features with a powerful headless CMS like React Bricks.

Elian Van Cutsem

Lead DevRel at React Bricks | CTO at Vulpo | Astro Maintainer | devs.gent meetup organiser

Insanely fast to production using Astro

Why do so many projects frustrate the developers working on them? In this talk, Bert tells the story of Frustrated Bob, a developer dealing with shifting priorities, vague requirements, and broken communication. It’s a sharp, honest look at why things go wrong on teams and what we can do to make them better. Expect practical takeaways, real examples, and some darkly funny moments every developer will recognise.

Bert De Swaef  

Owner, Founder at Vulpo Digital Studio

Frustrated Bob

Pro Zurich JS Meetup #7: Sizzling hot JavaScript

Serverless architectures offer scalability and cost benefits, but managing application state remains challenging. What if you could spin up a tiny server for every user with the same cost and scalability benefits? A server for every user, in a serverless architecture sounds new, right?
In this talk, I’ll introduce you to Durable Objects and help you understand the new paradigm of building stateful serverless apps. You will learn about the various benefits like low latency, faster database operations, and handling states for your serverless app.

JavaScript Gatherings in Zurich! 🎉

Pro Zurich JS Meetup #6: June's server solstice

Pro Zurich JS Meetup #7: Sizzling hot JavaScript

Pro Zurich JS Meetup #8: Flare up your Performance

Got JavaScript Wisdom to Share?

Host a ZurichJS Meetup! 🏢

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