Aris
Founder & Lead Organizer of CityJS
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Aris — founder and lead organizer of CityJS — to talk about building developer communities, organizing meetups, and scaling conferences into global events.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Aris:
🏀 Programming came late.
Aris started coding only at university, bringing a competitive, sports-like mindset from basketball into programming.
🖨 First job hack.
He figured out how to print remotely to stores across the UK — years before “remote work” was cool.
🖥 Framework wars shaped him.
From .NET to Angular, React, and Vue — he’s seen frontend evolve into today’s massive ecosystem.
🍕 Meetups > webinars.
It’s not about the talks alone. Meetups are for friendships, job leads, and building confidence in the community.
📢 Meetups as training grounds.
First-time speakers can practice at small meetups before stepping on a big conference stage.
📉 The 30% no-show rule.
No matter what you do, about a third of RSVPs won’t turn up. Plan your pizza order accordingly.
📆 Thursday is golden.
It’s the best day to host a meetup — people are downtown, ready for beers, and still get a long weekend.
💡 Conferences are real training.
They’re not “nice-to-haves.” One day of talks can reshape your career and bring back practices your team actually uses.
🌍 From local to global.
CityJS grew beyond London almost by accident — thanks to the community asking for events in their own cities.
🎤 Community is the product.
Without it, conferences are just expensive webinars. With it, they’re life-changing.
📚 Recommended Reads:
- Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson (lessons on leadership from the Bulls era)
- The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
🎤 Also in this episode:
- Creative sponsorship hacks (pizza, drinks, even burger vouchers)
- Why some companies still resist sending developers to conferences
- How COVID forced a pivot to virtual — and unexpectedly made CityJS global
Episode Length: 44 minutes of community building, meetup stories, and behind-the-scenes lessons from conferences at scale.
💡 More Recent Takeaways
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Tyler Benfield, Staff Software Engineer at Prisma, to go deep on database performance. Tyler's path into databases started at Penske Racing, writing trackside software for NASCAR pit stops, and eventually led him into query optimization, connection pooling, and building Prisma Postgres from scratch. From the most common ORM anti-patterns to scaling Postgres on bare metal with memory snapshots, this is the database conversation most frontend developers never get.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Corbin Crutchley — lead maintainer of TanStack Form, Microsoft MVP, VP of Engineering, and author of a free book that teaches React, Angular, and Vue simultaneously — to dig into what it actually means to maintain a library that gets a million downloads a week. Corbin covers the origin of TanStack Form, why versioning is a social contract, what nearly made him quit open source, and the surprisingly non-technical path that got him into a VP role.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Andrey Sitnik — creator of PostCSS, AutoPrefixer, and Browserslist, and Lead Engineer at Evil Martians — to explore how one developer became responsible for 0.7% of all npm downloads. Andrey shares the discrimination story that drove AutoPrefixer, the open pledge that forced PostCSS 8 to ship, and why the Mythical Man-Month applies directly to LLM agent coordination.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Aurora Scharff — Senior Consultant at Creon Consulting, Microsoft MVP in Web Technologies, and React Certifications Lead at certificates.dev — to explore the real mental model shift required to understand React Server Components. Aurora shares her path from Robotics to frontend, what it was like building a controller UI for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog in React, and why the ecosystem finally feels like it's stabilizing.
📻 Never Miss New Takeaways
Get notified when new episodes drop. Join our community of senior developers learning from real scaling stories.
💬 Share These Takeaways
Want More Insights Like This?
Subscribe to Señors @ Scale and never miss conversations with senior engineers sharing their scaling stories.