Passing the Lead NebraskaJS Organizer Baton

As NebraskaJS continues into its ninth year (and sixth year under my tenure—starting in 2012), it is with a twinge of sadness that I must tell you that the time has come for me to step down as lead organizer of the group. I will still remain an organizer and participant! Practically speaking, perhaps the most visible change to the group here is that my ugly mug isn’t the one that shows up on our meetup page.

Truth-be-told, the de-facto lead organizer has been Nick Nisi for some time and so this change was necessary to properly attribute Nick’s incredible contributions to the meetup. Everyone that knows Nick already knows that he’s a very talented community organizer and developer. A world renowned Vim expert, Nick worked for Sitepen (Dojo did it first) for many years and was recently snapped up by local greats, Flywheel. He is a professional conference emcee, shepherding three NEJS CONF events and now a TypeScriptConf in Seattle!

Follow @nicknisi on Twitter

❤️ NebraskaJS

NebraskaJS has a special place in my heart, truly. We’ve featured over 50 different speakers at about 90 events. We’ve held three conferences (I’ll still be co-organizing there too, of course).

Some of the absolute highlights for me have been:

• The unnamed speaker that called me out for the (now-fixed) sub-par font loading strategy on nebraskajs.com 😅😅😅
• Speaking at The White House about NebraskaJS
• Cooperating on great community events like a local screening of What Comes Next is the Future and all of the Tech Omaha Developer parties
• Tank Battle tournaments: 2014 and 2013
• Our prestigious Presenters Wall where the number of borders around your photo represents the number of times you’ve presented at the meetup. If you hit a certain threshold where the CSS can’t handle any more borders you get the coveted yellow ring!
• Open Source Hack Night when I helped get someone started on a PR to node.js core!
• Branching out to Lincoln
• The after-meetup conversations that led to so many side projects. Both Eleventy and fontspeed were started after a conversation sparked at NebraskaJS.

I am also super thankful to our rock-solid venue sponsor Blue Cross Blue Shield and our unwavering food sponsor Agape Red. The meetup would not be possible without them.

Keep on JavaScripting, y’all! Our next event is April 3rd!