Last week, I had a chance to attend, sponsor, and present at the Midwest JS conference in Minneapolis, MN.

I was excited because, I used to do a lot of web development but switched to other technologies a few years ago. During my time away from web development, JavaScript technology has had some amazing advances as many frameworks were created, rose to great popularity and fell out of favor to be replaced by a new framework. I watched from a distance as the web I knew changed from mostly server side code generating HTML to powerful client-side code calling back-end web services and dynamically updating content in the browser. Although my historical experience began with "classic" ASP and continued through ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC, I've spent the past few weeks learning how to build a site with Angular.

This conference featured very little Microsoft technologies and most of the attendees did not development with Microsoft tools. A quick glance around the room revealed more Macs than PCs. I was nervous because I didn't know many attendees and speakers and because I didn't know how they would respond to a Microsoft employee in their midst.

It turns out that I worried for nothing. I met so many people who were interested in hearing about what Microsoft was doing. Our support of open source technologies the past few years really resonated with this crowd and there was a lot of interest in tool like TypeScript.

I created a talk on Microsoft Edge - the new browser that ships with Windows 10 and replaces Internet Explorer. The audience was interested in the speed of this browser (it's a total rewrite of the rendering engine) and with its support of web standards. During Q&A, one attendee expressed frustration that the Edge team had not announced a version for the Mac.

It wasn't long ago that a non-Microsoft conference would have also been an anti-Microsoft conference. But I experienced none of this. Everyone I met kept an open mind about other technologies - including ours. And I learned a great deal from them about the tools and frameworks that they embrace.

I left with a favorable experience of the JavaScript community and a desire to connect with them more. Of course, my education in this area continues as I try to catch up with the advances of the past 4 years, but conferences like Midwest JS help.