@media Ajax

22 NOV

Well, that turned out rather nicely I must say. Really high quality presentations and great attendees – I really hope that Patrick makes it happen again. Here are the slides from my presentation: Metaprogramming JavaScript.

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In other news, Low Pro 0.5 is nearly ready to rock. The new version is quite a lot smaller as Prototype 1.6 has solved so many of the things I used to fix with Low Pro. It does however have a few nice new features. Watch this space.

Posted under: Events , JavaScript | 15 comments | Read More →

@media Ajax Is Scarily Good

21 AUG

It seems that the @media Ajax site has just been updated. I was looking forward to it before but more speakers have been added including Brendan Eich who, according the abstract, will be demonstrating a working version of Tamarin in Firefox!

Also, Dojo’s Alex Russell, jQuery’s John Resig, YUI’s Douglas Crockford and Prototype’s erm, me will be representing the major libraries and then there’s the Ajaxians, Ben and Dion stepping up for a keynote. Finally, Mr Jeremy Keith will be hosting the hot topics panel in the traditional @media style – Hot Topics panel + JavaScript people should be quite explosive. As it was put in the Prototype Core Campfire the other day, “The JavaScript community is not so much of a community, more of a debating society” It’s going to be excellent. Of course, as it’s in London town you know we’ll be sinking a good few pints after. It will be a rare chance to get together with fellow scriptie types this side of the pond and the only pub conversation you’ll ever be allowed to mention closures in….surely that’s a good thing?

There are still early bird tickets left until the end of august so get your arse down to the site and sign up.

My presentation, Metaprogramming JavaScript, is for all those people who moan that they never learn things at conferences. It’s journey into the deep innards of JavaScript and I’ll be explaining the some of the metaprogramming techniques used in YUI, Prototype and Low Pro along with really getting into advanced JavaScript concepts like prototype inheritance, functional programming and closures. I defy you to turn up and not learn something new.

Posted under: Events , JavaScript | 14 comments | Read More →

@media 2007 Europe Over, @media Ajax Announced

10 JUN

Yep, well that was that. @media Europe went off in the usual excellent fashion and it was an excellent few days. This years highlight was definitely the quality of the presentations…I learnt really quite a lot of new stuff and usually I learn next to nothing at conferences. Did you know that having more than two asset hosts can have a detrimental effect on download speed? Freaky. Håkon Wium Lie did a hugely informational presentation about CSS3 as well.

My presentation seemed to go down reasonably considering I was up against Andy Clarke’s traditional end of conference slot and that myself and Mark Boulton had an unfortunate clash of presentation analogies (his presentation likened typography to martial arts). The slides are on slideshare so feel free to check them out.

Finally, Patrick announced @media Ajax which I’ve been really excited about for a while. It’s a whole conference in London dedicated to DOM Scripting and Ajax which I’m really happy to be speaking at. I’m going to be presenting on a much more hardcore topic there: Metaprogramming in JavaScript.

And with that the conference season is over and I’ll be blogging about proper stuff again. In fact, this week I’ve got some fairly important stuff to talk about. Keep your RSS readers peeled.

Photo by Drew McLellan.

Posted under: Events , JavaScript | 10 comments | Read More →

RailsConf Is Over: One Down, One To Go

21 MAY

Secondly, there was lots of buzz about Merb which is really promising and in my opinion is starting to feel more like Rails 2.0 that Rails 2.0 is shaping up to be. It’s got all the really useful stuff that I use day to day in Rails and none of the stuff I don’t use. Better still all of the core features are really well implemented and feel really cruft-free (I read and understood the Merb source in about 2 hours). This makes it fast as well. Ezra seems committed to keeping the core pretty lean and providing most extra functionality as gems rather than plugins which seems extremely sensible. Plugins are simple are now suffering from a lot of the problems that gems have already solved (load order, dependencies, version control etc).

Finally, I was impressed with DHH’s keynote. He must be under large amounts of pressure to deliver the next new big feature but regardless his keynote was low-key and considered. There’s no big stuff on the way but what is coming is consolidating the core ideas of Rails, providing more sensible defaults, more support for REST and it sounds like some of the JavaScript helpers are being pulled to plugins (or at least some of them)....nice one!

On the social side it was great. Portland is a cool place and of course we had Robby and the Planet Argon crew to show us around and they did a great job. I think I managed to meet up with nearly everyone I wanted to, the highlight being lunch with Sam, Thomas and Seth and some chat about Prototype which has got me pretty enthused about contributing again. I even met the Rails Envy guy who is Ruby On Rails…rock on. There was a mad burlesque breakbeat marching band in the conference center at one point as well….got to like that. It was quite a Ruby moment when a guy in hot pants with a huge flag tried to dry hump Rich Kilmer. Poor dude.

My presentation, The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu, went down reasonably well from what I could tell (apparently, I was not slagged off on IRC…miracle!) and I’ll be putting the slides up as soon as I get a vaguely working wireless connection (I’ll update this post with the link). But Dr James’ presentation on plugins was a work of art. While my presentation involved me talking in a fake kung-fu voice, James had a gothic horror thing going on. Stupid voices from the Brits!

My only regret is that Zed Shaw won the Rails Pimp Cup ....that was main to be in my possession, damn it!

Now to get on a plane to San Francisco for @media America and a lot of footwear purchases.

Posted under: Events , JavaScript , Rails | 12 comments | Read More →