At MoscowJS 66, I asked more than 10 questions. Two of them were selected as the “best questions,” and I left the meetup with two prizes.
That is the easiest part of the story to remember. What made the evening useful for me, though, was deciding not to treat the Q&A as something that happens after the “real” content. I tried to follow the talks actively and use questions to clarify the parts I found most interesting or uncertain.
What MoscowJS 66 actually covered
The meetup took place in Moscow on July 3, 2025, at School 21. The official MoscowJS 66 program listed four talks. In practical terms, the evening covered Telegram bots and Web Apps for useful automation, LangChain.js and its developer experience, architecture decisions behind a site builder, and testing TypeScript types.
That is more precise than reducing the program to broad labels such as “AI” or “frontend architecture.” The AI-related talk was specifically about LangChain.js, while the architecture talk focused on building a site constructor and balancing flexibility with simplicity.
I treated Q&A as part of the technical content
During the event I asked more than 10 questions. That made me listen differently: understanding the main idea was not enough. I also had to notice assumptions, edge cases, and places where I wanted a more concrete explanation.
Two of my questions were eventually selected as the best questions, which meant I won two prizes. I can confirm that result from my own experience; I am not turning it into a general rule that asking more questions means winning something.
The lesson I would keep
The practical lesson for me is simple: a technical meetup becomes more valuable when I participate in it instead of consuming it passively. A good question can expose the boundary of an approach, reveal a trade-off that did not fit into the talk, or make an abstract idea concrete.
If you want to try the same style of participation, a useful approach is to write down one unresolved point during each talk and turn it into a short question with enough context to be answerable. The goal is not to ask as many questions as possible. The goal is to leave with fewer unchecked assumptions than you arrived with.
Thanks to the speakers and organizers for MoscowJS 66. I came for the talks, participated heavily in the Q&A, and ended the evening with two prizes and a much more active way of listening to technical presentations.