I was invited to give a talk at the Andersen’s office in Cracow during the Front-end Hero meetup on July 14th, where I talked about building games in 13 kilobytes.

It’s been almost a year since I gave an online talk, and more than two years since the talk was in person, that’s why I was quite excited to accept the invitation.

It was also a good opportunity to bring Ewa and Kasia with me, since we enjoyed a bit of vacations in Cracow last year. We arrived by train on Thursday, I went for the meetup in the evening while they watched Minions in the movie theater next to our hotel.

The agenda revolved around three talks: Evgeny Kirichuk (from Andersen) showcased rapid cross-platform JavaScript development from a single monorepo, I explored how limitations spawn creativity and presented lessons learned from a decade worth of js13kGames entries, and Piotr Zientara (Xfaang CEO and co-founder of WarsawJS) explained why communication is a hard skill.

It’s funny how it feels like I’m meeting Piotr more often outside Warsaw than in the city iself, even though we both live there. Anyway, the live stream of the whole meetup was recorded and is available here. I got very positive response about my talk, and had cool conversations with attendees afterwards.

Rest of our stay in Cracow, the whole Friday and half of Saturday, was spent sightseeing together - visiting the Wawel Dragon again, walking around the old town, even boarding the water taxi, and overall spending some quality time offline.