danwebb.net - Events

@media Ajax

2007-11-22T10:09:00Z

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.

| View | Upload your own

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.

@media Ajax Is Scarily Good

2007-08-21T10:50:00Z

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.

@media 2007 Europe Over, @media Ajax Announced

2007-06-10T08:13:00Z

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.

RailsConf Is Over: One Down, One To Go

2007-05-21T18:14:00Z

UPDATE: The RailsConf version of the slides are over at SlideShare. The versions of the presentation I’ll be doing at @media San Fancisco and @media London will be considerably different but the kung-fu foolishness will remain intact.

RailsConf 2007 is over and I have to say it was considerably better than the previous year. Rather than last year’s overwhelmingly self-congratulatory tone (“Aren’t we clever! We use Rails!” Accompanied by much clapping, standing ovations and general whooping) it was a much more down to business affair and although it was really big (1600 people) it was friendly.

So what was the big news this year? Firstly, I got the feeling that everyone was bracing themselves for “the enterprise” with JRuby going strong and Sun looming over the proceedings. It seems that everyone’s got a new Rails IDE on the way out and the exhibition hall was full of people hawking their wares and pretty much everyone I met was a full time Rails professional. I suppose the up side of this injection of big money into Rails is the free beer but aside from that I think the transition is going to be uneasy. Java and J2EE are great for getting huge amounts of programmers to write huge things because inevitably some of those programmers are going to be shit and Java and J2EE provide a strict framework by which you can’t go too wrong. However, Ruby on Rails is great for getting small amounts of really good programmers to churn out software quickly but doesn’t provide a rigid safety net which means a bad (or even not really good programmer) can basically bring an application to it’s knees. In fact, I’ve seen some terrible code in Rails apps recently…stuff that would make Koz and Jamis turn white. Rails dev shops really need to watch for this. Quality control, people!

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.

Off To RailsConf and @media America

2007-05-15T23:10:00Z

Just breaking radio silence briefly to say that I’m off to the states (again) to speak at RailsConf in Portland 17th-20th then on to @media America in San Francisco for the 21st-28th. I’m going to be doing presentations both called ‘The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu’, both with an old skool kung fu theme but quite different aside from that. If you are around in either of these places or have any tips on good skate and sneaker stores then drop me a line….I’m always up for a couple of cold ones or/and sneaker shopping missions.

When I get I’ll be working a load more on Low Pro and blogging more about it. It’s developing quickly at the moment as Prototype picks up momentum and it’s getting some damn good features. In the meantime, you could always check out the trunk and see the new features that have already gone in. Build the trunk release then try as a sneak preview:

$('an_element').wrap('<strong>');

Also, look out for a major new set of features for Event Wax scheduled for release round about the time of @media London.

BarCamp London 2

2007-02-19T13:22:00Z

BarCamp London was, as expected, great. I definitely felt like a got more out of it than last time (and it was good before). There were some great sessions but for me it was all about the talking in the corridors. It was excellent to meet and speak to some of the microformats people who I’d not had chance to speak to before like Chris Messina and Brian Suda and learn more about that. I’m pretty new to the whole thing but have taken more of an interest in it since deciding to write Sumo. It was also good to meet Andy Mitchell who’s been working on the other JavaScript microformats parser with Michael Kaply. I did however make a bit of a tit of myself during the microformats panel by asking them stupid questions about XFN. Sorry about that, I’ll be more sensible next time. To the panel’s credit they managed to come up with an informative and interesting answer regardless.

Aside from the microformats stuff I was fully into all the JavaScript stuff as always. I think my Metaprogramming Javascript presentation went down fairly well as I only solicited blank stares of confusion in the final example but really that’s to be expected…it was rather nuts and I’m not a natural at explaining complex things so I usually need to work out an explanation beforehand.

What was best about it for me was the conversation afterwards. Matthew Somerville said that he used similar techniques to have methods that replace themselves with shortcuts depending on what properties the browser has available which is a really nice use of metaprogramming for optimisation. Lawrence also pointed out that the JavaScript aspects stuff was another good example of using metaprogramming techniques. I think there’s going to be some real mileage in getting all of this stuff together so over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing a larger article/paper covering the whole area in detail. I’d also like to rework my BarCamp presentation, which was very brief for such a large topic, into a full length presentation for something like The Ajax Experience. On that note, can anyone think of a good online home for this article on metaprogramming? The usuals like A List Apart, Sitepoint and Digital Web probably won’t want a full on technical article like this so I’m a little stumped.

Anyway, for now here are the BarCamp slides as a PDF. You can also look at the full code for the examples I referred to in my SVN repos: DOMBuilder, Sumo and Behavior classes from Low Pro.

Nike SB 'Pub Standards'

2007-02-16T13:28:00Z

I like Pub Standards so much I commissioned Nike to make a commemorative colourway. I present to you The Nike SB ‘Pub Standards’...

15 Minutes Of Fame

2007-02-02T13:35:00Z

My dad posted me a DVD of my old band’s only TV appearance today. It’s got me miming in it.

LATEST: Looks like I’m going to presenting at RailsConf 2007 in Portland before moving on to @media is SF, Hong Kong and finally London. May and June are going to be hectic.

Coding Like A Bitch: Mephisto Plugins Upgraded and Fridaycities/EventWax Beta Biznizz

2007-01-31T16:57:00Z

Just a quick note to say that I’ve just upgraded to the newest version of Mephisto which has forced me to update my Mephisto plugins to work with the new updates to Liquid. Sorry for being slack on that. I’ve had a ton of email about it but hadn’t had the chance to fix these since my new venture into the freelance world has started.

In unrelated news, most of my coding effort has been going into a site called Fridaycities which is a cool site where Londoners ask questions and get insider info about all things London-ish. It’s great to browse around…Apparently there’s an Elvis Chinese restaurant on Old Kent Rd and a naked disco in Vauxhall. Who’d a thunk it? It’s still in very early stages at the moment but the FC people have got big plans and myself and Mr Tanner are beavering away on it as we speak. It’s invite only but you can check out the posts without registering so go have a squizz.

Finally, EventWax has been going great guns. It’s great to see a load of events running on there including @media2007 and BarCampLondon2. We been collecting lots of feedback and slowly introducing features but there’s going to be some cool changes in the near future so keep an eye out there.

Finally, I’m stacking up a few patches for Prototype and Rails that I need to finish up. Hopefully I’ll get chance to do that soon. Writing patches for Rails is weird. I tend to find myself spending 20 seconds on getting the patch done and 3 hours trying to bash tests together. Does anyone else find writing tests for the Rails core a bit of a pain in the arse?

The Ajax Experience: Bar Conversations

2006-10-26T19:41:00Z

I’m still here in the Westin Waterfront, Boston preparing to have a touristy day out but though it would be a good time to reflect on the goings on at the conference. I’m sure many other bloggers will cover the goings on in the presentations so I thought I’d give you a run down of what went on at the important part of any conference: The conversations that happened in the bar…

In terms of the attendees The Ajax Experience was top notch. All the major players where in attendence from prominent members of the Dojo, Prototype and jQuery communities to large delegations from Yahoo, Google, Sun, AOL and IBM and of course, and probably most importantly, Brendan Eich and the IE team. This great turn out was partly due to the organizers giving two free tickets to each of the speakers. Quite a cunning maneuver as many of the speakers brought their friends with them. Many of which where of course pretty damn good JavaScript proggers. Nice work, Ajaxian.

Anyway, on to the main event. The pub conversations.

IE 7 and beyond

So what’s does the future hold for IE 7? TAE offered a unique opportunity to find out more about what’s going…over a beer. Chris Wilson’s keynote was really entertaining but didn’t detail much in the way of IE 7. Luckily, later that evening we all hit Buckowski’s somewhere in Back Bay and got a chance to chat with some of the IE team. They genuinely seem to be seeking plenty of input from the development community as to what to fix and in what order. This is likely to be spearheaded by the WASP and possibly the DOM Scripting Task Force. If this is the case I hope they’ll open up the process a little. JavaScript / DOM Scripting seems like it’s on the agenda nonetheless which has got to be good.

Battling libraries

It’s good to report that there is no war. It was great to meet up with John Resig, Alex Russell and representatives of all the big libraries and exchange a few ideas. Tuesday afternoon saw the first ‘Hands Across JavaScript Library Peace Beer Tasting’ at the Harpoon Brewery which was a very brief chance to chat with the Dojo guys while tasting fine ales. The buzz there definitely seems to be cometd – Alex is looking for writers of a cometd server for Ruby (and as many platforms as possible)...any takers? I think coding something like this in Ruby many prove challenging but would be a great tool to have.

Although I don’t get on the immensity and don’t feel it fits most web projects, Dojo really deserved to be taken notice of by all JavaScript programmers. It’s got alot of time and money invested in it and Alex Russell is just about the best project lead a JS library could have. It’s going to be a great place to look for the latest innovations in JavaScript. Take the new accessible widget implementations in 0.4, IBM have been lending there time and experience to the project and Becky Gibson’s excellent presentation taught me a thing or two. However, it didn’t take place in a bar so I’m afraid I can’t cover it here.

JavaScript coders love Hip Hop…who’d have thunk it?

Nate Koechley is well into his Jurassic 5 and old school stuff but he’s not into Hyphy. He knows where the good record stores are in San Francisco are though. Aaron and Andrew are also partial to a bit of the boom bap. Ajaxian’s Rob Sanheim, on the other hand is a retired raver but still likes a bit of LTJ Bukem. He did however tell me that my jeans were out of date club kid fashion. Bah, what does he know?

Prototype stuff and things

TAE was an excellent chance to meet up with Justin and Andrew, fellow Prototype, erm, types. John Resig’s presentation on choosing a library brought up a few points about Prototype that really should be addressed, documentation being the main one. Well, rest assured we are on that one. Expect some very good documentation in the near future. We also chatted about a whole host of possible improvements to Prototype that we might be able to tempt Sam to commit. I think we might give some of them a good road test in Low Pro so watch out for that. Also, after speaking about Low Pro in my presentation the (mostly under developed) idea of behavior classes seem to spark some interest so I’m going to be working on that.

Best quote:

At least they have dicks!

Justin Palmer [referring to browsers…I think]

Justin, if I misquoted you feel free to correct me. It was late and my brain was full of Blue Moon.

@media Goes Global: Europe, America and Asia

2006-09-22T16:17:00Z

It’s just been officially announced. Next year there’s not going to be one @media conference, there’s going to be three! And, hopefully, I’ll be on the trail with Patrick helping out with all of them which should be gruelling but very cool. I’m looking forward to going back to Asia especially. Woo!

Apologies for all this excessive amount of conference related babble on this blog recently, I’ll resume posting real, actual information soon. In other news, since Event Wax development is winding to a close within the next week or so, I’m going to available to take on some more development projects so if you need any help with Ajax, DOM Scripting and/or Ruby On Rails you know where I am. Drop me a line and we can talk about it. More on this later.

RailsConf Presentation Slides and Example Code

2006-09-18T09:50:00Z

As promised, here are the slides and example code from my RailsConf presentation.

Presentation Slides (PDF)
Example Application (ZIP)

RailsConf Europe: Done and Dusted

2006-09-15T19:25:00Z

I’m lying on the sofa slightly crippled and recovering from RailsConf Europe. It’s been a hectic couple of days but extremely worthwhile and I have to say, having been to both RailsConfs this year, I think the European version really kicked the American version’s arse. The selection of presentations was outstanding on the whole and covered a massive a really wide range of interesting topics. Also, while RailsConf had a slightly self-cngratulatory tone (I put that in a much cruder way after a few pints last night), RailsConf Europe had a real ‘down to business’ kind of feel. The energy and excitement was directed towards improving and moving forward rather than just slapping each other on the back cos we are smarter than those other people who don’t use Rails yet. So, without future ado, on to details…

The Highlights

The first highlight was definitely seeing ActiveResource actually working and being introduced to Simply Helpful during DHH’s keynote. I must admit, when he starting saying he was starting to say he was introducing more automation in views, I thought ‘Oh shit…this isn’t looking good. Time to find a new framework.’ but as he explained more I actually love the idea. In fact, what I’m really excited about is what implications it will have on the UJS Plugin but more on that in a future blog post. Check the brief overview of SImply Helpful for more details.

The second highlight was Hampton’s absolutely inspiring presentation style. Swearing like a trooper with a can of Stella in his hand throughout. Rock and roll! The fact that we have people like this in the Rails community is one of the things I love about it. Also, the social aspects were damn good although my liver probably doesn’t agree after three nights of hard drinking. I can’t believe the amount of wicked people I met over the past few days, an excellent crowd. Also got a chance to meet some more Caboosers and put some faces to IRC nicks.

Simon did a cool presentation about what Rails could learn from Django and it was good to see it was met with open minds rather than sniggering at the back and jokes about indentation. Django is a great project and does have lots of great features that Rails could use. I might try to implement some myself.

Favourite quote: “If you can’t change your organisation, change your organisation.”

Unobtrusive Ajax For Rails: My Presentation

I was really pleased with the reception my presentation got. In fact, I ended up doing it twice. Extra dates on the Unobtrusive JavaScript tour! My scheduled time was straight after DHH and Kathy Sierra’s keynotes and was in one of the smaller rooms which I was actually quite pleased about as it was alot less scary than I envisioned it being but, athough I didn’t notice at the time, there were loads of people who couldn’t get in. I’d sold out which was really quite amazing. After this David Black asked if I’d do a repeat in the main room so everyone else could see it. Now that was scary.

From the feedback I got and browsing around Technorati it seems that alot of people are really into the idea. Even DHH seemed to like it. I’d not really expected this at all. Up until recently I’d got the impression that most of the Rails community where happy doing things the old school way but it seems this is not the case. I got some excellent questions in both sessions as well but you can check those out on the recordings when thery come out. Big ups to Rabble though, he pointed out that he’d implemented all the JS stuff on Odeo unobtrusively and once forgot to deploy the scripts but didn’t notice the JS wasn’t there for quite a while because the site worked so well without it. Excellent! I also got to vent a bit about my new obsession with trainers with my example application. It even inspired Geoffrey Grosenbach to hit the Bathing Ape store and buy some new Bapesta’s. Excellent.

When I get back to my Mac on monday I’ll post the slides and my example application. Also, over the next few weeks we’ll be working on the next major release of UJS which will include a load of helpers for testing and debugging including a new debugger tool for Low Pro. Keep and eye out for that. So yes, hopefully this exposure really should get alot more people trying out the plugin. If you do please be sure to post bugs and feature suggestions to the UJS Trac – we’d love the help.

Finally, Luke has written up a load of stuff from the conference including a run down of my presentation with some of his own comments on the subject so definitely check that out.

Next stop Boston for The Ajax Experience where I’ll be doing an extended version of the presentation with extra hardcore JavaScript action. Hopefully I’ll be able to present at next year’s RailsConfs too, I’ll definitely be attending them either way.

Unconnected Stuff And Things

2006-09-11T11:48:00Z

There’s a load of stuff going on at the moment and it’s all pretty good so I’ve decided to blab randomly on all of them in this post.

Firstly, dConstruct when off with a bang on friday and was excellent. The presentations were all really interesting and I got lots from it, particulary as I’ve got to present myself on thursday at RailsConf. Derek Featherstone’s presentation on DOM Scripting and accessiblity was of particular relevence to me and contained some really interesting tips. I can’t lie though, I was there for the party really and it was very entertaining. I spent most of the night talking about Hip Hop which is always good. Cheers Ross, Rocco, Olly and Mike for feeding my obsession. The rest of the weekend was spend with the wife doing anniversary things. Good weekend, it was.

Meanwhile, I’m putting the finishing touches to my RailsConf presentation about unobtrusive Ajax. At the last minute I decided to switch the focus of my presentation from the tools to the whys and what-fors of unobtrusive scripting after realising that unobtrusive scripting is hardly known amoungst the Rails community. I’m hoping to show how easy it is to do things properly once you start scripting with graceful degradation in mind. We’ll see how that goes. My presentation at The Ajax Experience has the same title but will take quite a different tack to accomodate the different audience and will go much more into the technicalities of the plugin and the Low Pro library. Hope to see some of you at these events and if you have any feedback I’d love to hear it.

FInally, I’d like to draw your attention to Moo Tools, a really promising library from the guy who gave us Moo.fx. It’s compact and modular design is really very similar to A library project I’ve had on the go for a while now. I think this modular, highly expandable architecture really is the way to go with JavaScript libraries. He’s even used Dean’s Base.js as well. Great minds think alike…

BarCamp London Was Champion

2006-09-03T20:50:00Z

I’ve just got back from a grueling couple of days at BarCamp London and I have to say it’s been one of the best events I’ve been to. I always enjoy going to conferences and have found nearly all of them valuable in one way or another but the informal approach and relatively small numbers gave the event a very two-way feel. Everyone of the sessions I went to was interesting and every conversation was valuable. I’ve came away with an enormous amount of tidbits of information, ideas and inspiration. Some discussions I had there have caused me to almost completely change the focus of my forthcoming presentation on Unobtrusive Ajax at RailsConf but it’ll definitely be for the better.

The notable talks for me came where Matt Webb’s presentation and discussion on the web apps of the future, All I Learnt About Programming I Learnt From Typography and the incredibly unpractical but entertaining presentation about 3D in JavaScript (which was quite impressive).

It was great to meet up with the Brit Rubists and JavaScript people in attendance and share a few ideas. The weekend finished with a few beers in the Curzon Cinema bar with Jonathan and Luke from Agile Evolved and Damien Tanner and alot of conversation about music, weird technology and good shit like that. All in all, excellent. Thanks to Ben, Ian, Paul and Murray for sorting it all out. I’ll definitely be there next year.