Engineering ZurichJS

For the first time, we’re pulling back the curtain on the engineering behind ZurichJS Conf before the conference goes live.

This is the story of designing and running a multi-hundred-person international conference as a side project, from the product ideas and operational tooling to the systems that keep tickets affordable, workflows resilient, and a tiny team moving quickly.

Across more than 1,000 commits, we’ve had to build, distribute, scale, and continuously iterate on the platform under severe time constraints and limited resources.

This talk is about what that actually looked like, the creative product decisions behind it, the shortcuts that worked, the ones that did not, and the lessons from building something that has to operate like a real platform without the team or resources normally behind one.