With ForwardJS San Francisco behind me, I turned my sights on bringing Forward home with me to Ottawa for the second year in a row.

ForwardJS Ottawa in 2017 was a cool, calm introduction to the Canadian capital. But this year, we wanted to go bigger…and better.

The only way to do that was to pack the conference with great workshops and two days of stellar speakers, and boy did we deliver.

Day 1 saw ForwardJS jump out the gate in full force. With Andy Mockler and Kristin Spencer starting the show schooling us on soft skills, the day was filled with awesome talks like Adam Daw touting the power of transpilation, Jan C. Liz-Fonts showing how to harness Blockchain in Javascript and Mary Snow decoding the NodeJS Event Loop.

That first day brought so much great knowledge — so the speakers on day 2 really had their work cut out for them. And they were more than up to the task. The day saw Jenn Voss bring us Tales from the QA Crypt, Eric Adamski’s amazing energy with Rx and Async, Ksenia Coulter teaching us to Get the Most out of Code Reviews and Brian Tavares closing out with a fantastic React Native talk.

I’m more than willing to admit bias and won’t deny it could be in part to my involvement in organizing or the fact it was in my hometown, but in the battle of San Francisco vs. Ottawa I’d say the “north of the border” contender took the ForwardJS crown this year.