Jeffconf– a community conference in London for folks interested in serverless architectures

So this Friday I will be attending and moderating a panel at Jeffconf. You’re probably wondering what on earth that is. Is Jeff some new programming language or something? Read on…

One Day. One Track. One Community.

A collaboration in conjunction with the Serverless London User Group, JeffConf is an attempt to move past the word Serverless, and focus on the use of these platforms and the value they provide.

I love intimate single track conferences. This one was hastily put together by Ant Stanley and Paul Johnston, when another conference folded, so taking advantage of available resources – in this case Saint John’s Church in Hoxton. Both are stalwarts of the serverless scene, often to be found on twitter arguing the benefits of things like GraphQL. Ant organised the inaugural Serverlessconf with ACloudGuru, a beautiful hot mess of a conference in a garage in Williamsburg, NY with no air conditioning.  Ant and Paul wanted to do something by and for locals, and the agenda reflects that pretty well.

The name actually came from a joke by Paul. Folks keep saying “but serverless doesn’t mean no servers”, which really grinds my gears, so Paul simply said: “Serverless is just a name. We could have called it Jeff”. Whatever the name, there is folks are already getting significant value from Amazon Web Services Lambda, and increasingly other implementations of the concept. Check out the agenda, note the lack of Big Vendor talks, the agenda has people’s names but not corporate affiliations, and then grab yourself a ticket. I am particularly looking forward to hearing more about the Financial Times serverless project.

The organisers have tried to create as welcoming a space as they can and I believe there are some free tickets still available for under-represented groups in technology.