Vancouver in February is grey, damp, and deeply committed to JavaScript.
This month’s Valentine’s Day edition of VanJS felt different though. There were pink accents, chocolate on the snack table, and that slightly chaotic pre talk buzz that only happens when developers are caffeinated and curious.
I’ve been running VanJS for a while now, and every time I look out at the room, I’m reminded why I keep doing it.
This community leans in.
A Valentine’s Theme: Relationships on the Web
For this edition, Interledger Foundation sponsored the event, which made it the perfect setting to talk about Web Monetization. Valentine’s Day is about relationships, and the web desperately needs a healthier one between creators and value.
TL/DR: So what is Web Monetization?
At its core, it is an open standard that allows websites to receive tiny, continuous payments from users as they consume content. Not ads. Not a hard paywall. Not a subscription you forget about until your credit card reminds you. It streams value in the background, in real time.
That's the theory. The real magic happened after the talk.
As soon as we wrapped, I barely made it back to the pizza table before people started coming up to me. Not polite head nods. Actual, animated curiosity. Developers wanted to understand how it could work in their own projects. Debating about documentation sites, open source repos and AI agents paying for API calls per millisecond.
A few conversations turned almost philosophical. What does it mean if value on the web becomes as streamable as video? How would that reshape incentives? Could we design systems that reward contribution without turning everything into a growth hack?
When Developers Start Connecting Dots
That is what I love about VanJS. It is never just about frameworks. Underneath the surface, there is always a deeper question about what kind of internet we are building.
Running this meetup has shown me that developers care about sustainability and fairness more than we admit. We joke about shipping fast and breaking things, but when you put a new economic model in front of a room full of engineers, they start thinking about long term incentives almost immediately.
Chocolate, JavaScript, and Big Questions
The open web is strange and unfinished. We inherited an internet optimized for ads because that is what scaled at the time. But that does not mean it is the final form. Standards evolve.
VanJS continues to be that space where ideas meet code, and where big questions about the future of the web get debated over chocolate and JavaScript.
That is my kind of Valentine’s story.
That's it from me! 👋🏻 Have any questions? feel free to join our Slack channel and DM me: SLACK LINK
Bibi
Community Manager @ Interledger Foundation 🌱
// here's an Easter Egg for those hunting 🥚
Top comments (1)
Would Web Monetization be my Standards Valentine?