The Beginning…
At the beginning of March, 2025. I had a chance to meet a few browser folks in South Korea who work or have worked on the browser field.
It was nice to meet them and talk about very enjoyable topics. It was chill and pleasant time.
One of the topics we talked about was ‘what if we hold a browser engineer meetup’. Yeah. It was one of the lighter topics and we didn’t talk about it too seriously.
So after a while, at the end of the March, we chatted about that on KakaoTalk (which is chat application like line or signals). And we scheduled for initial meeting.
One of us had experience organizing developer meetups, so we got off to a great start.
I am so excited about this because I felt there was lack of space for browser engineers in south korea.
Yeah, this journey had begun.
The Planning
So for a few months, we held regular meetings at Mondays 10PM. The first issue and probably hardest, thing was ‘naming’. Yes. The naming.
We had several candidates… like
- Blink On Korea
- Open Web Platform Meetup
- Web Platform Dev Meetup
- …and the others
One of us proposed ‘browseRus’ which was inspired by Toys“R”Us.
And the process went smoothly. We decided on and done like:
- Making a google form for invitations
- Making a landing page to describe what it is and what to do
- Securing a location; it is most important thing I guess.
- Goods; the cup
- Preparing a feedback form
- Defining the event format: deep technical sessions or light topics … etc
- Thinking about how to help people connect. What if a participant struggles to talk?
- separating the event into two sessions. First is a lightning talk session, Second is networking sessions
- Providing Pizza and Chicken with beers.
- Preparing question card for the Second session
- Offering a discount for students
- and… many things!
The landing page: Browser Night 2025 - browseRus
The time flew by so fast. Before we knew it, it was the end of May.
I also prepared my lightning talk: Chromium, V8 Committer 2관왕 달성기
The D-Day
May 29, 2025. I finished my work at 6:00PM and headed to the Open Up Center, the location of our meetup. It was a rainy day.
Many people had already arrived at the center. I greeted the participants at the front desk, checked them in and provided name badges with goods.
In total, 53 people attended this event!
We jocked that these people were all of the browser engineers in south korea.
The lightning talk session:
| Speaker | Topic |
|---|---|
| Sangwoo Ko | YouTubing with Chromium |
| Seokho Song | My Journey to Becoming a Committer for Both Chromium and V8 |
| Gyuyoung Kim | Introduction to Blink for iOS |
| Gyuyoung Kim | Introduction to Blink for Apple tvOS |
| Hyungwook Lee | AI in the Web and Browsers |
| Hyunjune Kim | Machine Unlearning and Recent Updates |
| Euisang(Amos) Lim | My Experience as a Mentor at the Open Source Contribution Academy |
| 최민섭 | Open Source Contribution Academy: My First Chromium Contribution Story |
| Joonghun Park | An Introduction to Samsung Internet |
| 최영수 | How LG Uses a Web Engine: About LG webOS |
| 최병운 | Introducing a Book on Browser Engineering |
| 이상현 | The browser that actually does stuff for you |
| Alan Jinkyu Jang | The History of Interaction Tech: Beyond Mouse and Keyboard |
| Hyojin Song | A Story About a Chromium Developer I Met at a W3C Meeting |
| Dongjun Kim | The Failure Story of “JuOSA” (Weekend Open Source Doers) |
(Note: To respect the original and accurate spelling, some speakers’ names are written in Korean.)
There are some pictures from event:
name badge
introduction
my lighting talk!
cup!
browser folks!
Looking back
So yeah. The first Browser Night was a success.
The all sessions were very exciting and helpful and fun.
The networking session was very fun, and everyone enjoyed chatting with each other. We had been a little worried about breaking the ice, but that concern was completely unnecessary.
Based on the feedback form, we got a 4.87 out of 5 for overall satisfaction.
And 92.7% of people responded that they would like to attend again. (If include respond ‘consider’ it would be 100%.)
Thanks to…
I’m so grateful for my co-organizers. Seriously, this would have been impossible without them leading the way.