For $275? No way.

This is a not-for-profit event and every penny will be spent on flying in the best speakers and providing a really amazing experience for the attendees, many of which are coming in from out of town. In fact, we'd have to charge much more if not for the financial support of our sponsors.

Why is icanhazcheezburger sponsoring this?

Ben Huh, their CEO, started the network in in Seattle and still lives here, as does the company (to the best of my knowledge)

I think this is the exactly the right place and the right time for such an event. Great to see it in my backyard!

Glad you're excited! I moved to Seattle almost exactly 3 years ago to work at Microsoft and was always mystified why I had to go somewhere else (DC, Portland, Scottsdale, the list goes on) to attend an awesome JS conference. That sense of "why not us?" was the genesis for this event.

Cool idea. Any idea on what the topics will be?

Good question. Topics will run the gamut of applications of JS (browser, Node.js, Windows 8, etc). We used GitHub to post a public call-for-speakers. Prospective speakers were asked to fork the repo, add their proposal and submit a pull request. All credit to Troy Howard (@thoward37) for setting that up. You can check-out the submissions here:

https://github.com/cascadiajs/cascadiajs.github.com/tree/mas...

Javascript!

CascadiaJS had an open call for proposals - you can read about most of them here:

https://github.com/cascadiajs/cascadiajs.github.com/tree/mas...