From the Front & Bologna

What is From the Front?

From the Front is a Front-End italian conference (but obviously, talks are in English). This time was the 4th edition and welcomed about 400 attendees in an incredible place, the Teatro Duse in Bologna.

It lasts 2 full days, from 10 to 18 with a breakfast, a lunch, some breaks and even a party between the 2 days (huge thanks to the organizers and especially to Luca). This schedule is awesome for learning a lot of things during the conferences as well as meeting people!

Why was it important for Mailjet to be present?

Mailjet loves developers, we offer them an emailing API and some wrappers to help them in their work and have a simple and fast solution to send emails in their projects.

Plus, there were a lot of attendees because of the awesomeness of the event itself: it's one of the biggest Front conferences in Europe, with great speakers, set in a magical place! Furthermore, it was the first event Mailjet attended in Italy, so we were very excited to meet new people!

For us, being present at events makes a huge difference : you actually meet people, so they will then be able to identify you and to put a face on your company. Plus, if you make a good impression, this feeling will be associated to your product too.

What about the talks?

We were really lucky to be here: we heard great talks from awesome speakers.

The conferences were more of a high-level concept : Estelle Weyl’s talk about Responsive Web Design made us realize that we are too focused on the actual design we have for every device. But the thing is that we need to consider that people who visit our websites on their smartphones don’t often have the same connection that they have on their computers: they want it to load quickly. Performance is the key!

On my side, I especially liked the talk done by Christian Heilmann. He explained a philosophy weshould all apply: make things move by working on projects, then make them open source by writing articles about them and connecting with people sharing the same state of mind. This is exactly what we try to do as developers evangelists.

Who did we meet? It's networking time!

We met a lot of Italian (obviously...) developers (mostly front-end, of course) working in very different industries: automobile, insurance, luxury...

We talked a lot with Christian Heilmann, developer evangelist @ Mozilla, owner of the website Developer Evangelism, and writer of a book about our unusual work. He’s really accessible and has very pleasantly shared advice about his work (which is also ours).

Overall, we really enjoyed this event on all points. See you at From the Front 2015? We'll be there for sure!

And should you have attended this year edition, feel free to comment to share your experience!