In the great tradition of using buzz words, here is a “post-mortem analysis”, a “retro”, a “Spotify Wrapped” if you will, a post recapping events that happened this year within Toronto JS.
Foreword
It was a great year for our TorontoJS community: we ran over 64 events, sent over 100,000 messages, and ate over 1,000 slices of pizza.
We had lots of initiatives and ideas brewing and taking form, including a Design Team starting, the VMS Project also getting started, and we cannot forget this blog!
We also some beloved organizers stepping back their involvement, leaving some big shoes to fill. We wish you all the best with your new jobs/babies/schooling/etc.!
With this rollercoaster of a year, we continue on a thrill ride for 2025 – it is looking to be a very exciting year for us, so let’s see what the future holds!
Sponsorships
This year we saw the amazing work spearheaded by Ken Beaudin and Aman Aalam to close sponsorships and secure funding and venues for us to run in-person events!
We want to particularly highlight Dragonfly DB and Sanity for their generous long-term sponsorship of our Tech Talk event series, and to Super.com for hosting us at their lovely event space.
Events
In 2024 we had a host of events going on, including Tech Talks, Workshops, Game Nights, Design Talks, Accessibility Talks, and Women in Tech Events, available on our Guild and Meetup pages.
A big highlight goes to the organizers who got even more serious than before about making the community grow and started having a weekly call, even with everyone complaining about the early time.
Another huge highlight goes to Danny Kim and his community, Maple Code, which runs a weekly mob programming event. It is an awesome community with awesome people, go check them out!
Teams
This year we started a restructuring process to organize into teams. The idea is that people on teams can organize to run events, start projects, and have all the current autonomy members of the community already have, while giving some base structure and help the organization to keep track of what is happening and who is responsible for all that goes on the community.
The teams that we have so far, with the team lead(s) in parentheses where appropriate:
- Design Team (Mariana Rocha)
- Leadership Team (Dann)
- Volunteer Management System Team (Marco Campos)
- Events Team (Aman Aalam)
- Promo Team (Ken Beaudin)
- Mod Team
- Web Team
- Blog Team
That leads to the next topic…
Projects
Along with teams, we have been building cool things and in the spirit of engineering we decided to build some of those cool things as projects.
Projects have goal and may have a timeline, but most importantly they have a result in the end, something that will help (or just be super cool) for the community.
This year’s projects are:
- Toronto JS Blog. This one you are reading right now! Created by drey moreau and Marco Campos.
- VMS, currently in development.
- Project Pipeline Project.
- Timeline Project.
Big thanks
It is important to note we couldn’t have made our community thrive without all of the hard working members that are part of it. We can only reach the heights that we are achieving because of the solid foundation created by all the engagement and support that every single person here provides. We wouldn’t be here without you, thank you!
In closing
2024 was a busy year for the Toronto JS community, with lots of interesting ideas and projects going on. With high hopes, we cross the yearly bridge into 2025 to make it an even better to and for the Toronto JS community.
Toronto JS needs you!
If you are interested in joining a team, starting a new project, or just hanging around join us on slack and join the #teams-and-projects channel!