Rey Bango

I just finished my presentation at Think Vitamin’s jQuery Online Conference and it was such a great experience. This is the first BIG virtual conference I’ve presented at and it ran smooth as silk. I really have to hand it to the Carsonified team; they have their act together.

The big takeaways:

• Online conferences rock! No travel == less expenses.
• The technology is good enough to be able to do this and WebEx is awesome.
• Carsonified’s got this down. While some tech problems are expected, they’ve really got the process working well.

The only downside, from a speaker perspective, is that you really can’t see how your audience is reacting. That’s tough because sometimes, you’re able to adjust according to your audience’s feedback. If there’s dead silence, you know you need to bring them back. If they’re engaged, you know you’re on track. In a virtual conference, you can’t gauge that so it’s tough.

Lots of folks have asked for the code for the Twitter demo that I did. You can now download that below:

Download the Twitter Demo Source

I want to thank everyone for attending and for the kind words. I really appreciate it. I also want to thank Carsonified for giving me the opportunity to speak at a great event.

This coming Monday (7/12/2010), I’ll be one of the speakers at Think Vitamin’s jQuery Online Conference. I’ll be speaking about using the Microsoft jQuery Template plugin to produce easily maintainable dynamic pages via pre-built JavaScript templates. This is a great topic and it looks like the event is generating a lot of registrations. Very cool.

I’ll be joined by three other awesome speakers including John Resig, Karl Swedberg and Ben Alman. Here’s the breakdown of the sessions:

Topics and schedule

• Beyond String Concatenation. Using jQuery Templating to Cleanly Display Your Data
  Rey Bango
  In this presentation, Rey will show you a new way to produce easily maintainable dynamic pages via pre-built JavaScript templates and the Microsoft jQuery templating plugin.
• Testing Your Mobile Web Apps
  John Resig
  This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices, based upon the work that’s been done by the jQuery team. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.
• Taking jQuery Effects to the Next Level
  Karl Swedberg
  One of the first things web developers learn to do with jQuery is to show and hide elements on a page and then add some flair by sliding those elements up and down or fading them in and out. Too often, though, we stop there, missing out on the incredible range and flexibility of jQuery’s core effects. In this talk, we’ll investigate both standard and custom animations and how they can be used to create useful and fun effects. We’ll also build a couple effects plugins, explore parts of the effects API that are often overlooked, and learn how to avoid common problems when attaching these effects to certain events.
• jQuery Pluginization
  Ben Alman
  In this live-coding session, Ben explains how, with just a little thought and effort around generalization, parameterization and organization, you can convert your “just get the job done” jQuery code into a legitimate, reusable, modular jQuery plugin.

This really is a great lineup and I’m looking forward to being a part of this great event. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done a presentation so this will be a good warm up for some other conferences I plan on speaking at later this year.

Be sure to use the following discount code for a 15% discount on registration: jquery15

Last Saturday I attended TXJS, my second conference of the year focused specifically on JavaScript-related discussions and presentations. The conference drew approximately 180 attendees consisting of some of the most well-known JavaScript developers in the world including Douglas Crockford (JavaScript luminary), Pete Higgins (Dojo Project Lead), John Resig (creator of jQuery), Andrew Dupont (lead developer of Prototype), and more.

Sessions

The conference was a bit different from JSConf, which I attended in April, in that it clearly was focusing more on client-side development versus server-side JavaScript implementations such as Node or Narwhal. The discussions, though, were similar in targeting the intermediate to advanced developer levels which demonstrates a maturing of the JavaScript developer community. Sessions were given by well-known developers such as Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Brian Leroux (Nitobi & mobile expert), John Resig (creator of jQuery) and Pete Higgins (Dojo team lead), to name a few.

While I attended several sessions, including some dealing cross-domain communication and Facebook’s abstraction layers, one sidebar impromptu session interested me the most because it really wasn’t supposed to be a session. A developer from the Selenium project asked John Resig, Pete Higgins and Ed Spencer (lead developer for Ext JS) to sit with him to discuss application testing. That turned into a full-on panel discussion about the topic attended by ~30 people. The feedback:

• It was said that Selenium was not a great testing tool but it’s the only choice we have
• Selenium’s lack of intimate knowledge of the major frameworks is a hindrance in spite of the fact that these libs are just JavaScript
• Mobile is severely lacking adequate testing tools forcing developers to purchase expensive handsets to verify functionality

I also heard that John Resig’s presentation, “JavaScript on the Mobile Web”, was outstanding. John has been doing a tremendous amount of mobile testing, specifically to be able to build jQuery for Mobile and has documented quite a bit of information on the various mobile browsers and their support of JavaScript and the DOM.

Microsoft

Now that I’m working at Microsoft, I much more aware of what’s being said about the company because I want to be able to report on the good and fix the bad.

Some of the Good Points:

• We sponsored the shuttle bus which was prominently mentioned during the keynote and heavily used by attendees for going to the event as well as returning to the sponsor hotel. It seemed that the shuttle bus really helped the attendees and I’m glad we handled that.
• I spoke to a number of attendees who were both surprised and impressed by Microsoft’s expanded efforts to address client-side developers. Our announcements around IE9 relating to HTML5, CSS3 & related specs has also been a boon with VERY positive feedback about our direction. Developers are genuinely excited about this but are anxious for more information and transparency. Having IE PM Carter Rabasa attend TXJS was invaluable. He was able to vet questions for developers as well as offer feedback about HTML5 and CSS3.
• The “IE6 Must Die” mantra was nowhere near the level that was displayed during JSConf. Feedback from several developers was much more empathetic with many simply saying that supporting IE6 is “part of our responsibility as web developers”. It’s not to say that anyone has to like the current state of affairs and I know I would like IE6 to go away (as would Microsoft) so we can leverage the cool new stuff but when you look at feedback from Tom Ochinno of Facebook where he clearly said that dropping IE6 would affect 5M+ users, that puts a very different spin on what we unfortunately need to support.
• Douglas Crockford attended Jeffrey’s session and expressed how much he loves Reactive Extensions for JavaScript. This made me very happy for my friends Jeffrey Van Gogh and Matthew Podwysocki, who have worked so hard on this.

Some of the Bad Points:

• Developers want more information on IE9 and that’s not something I could offer at this time. Always tough.
• Developers want IE6 to go away (so do we!) and that’s not something I could offer either. I think we need to focus on outlining, in a central place, all of the things that would make supporting IE6 much easier instead of developers learning by the school of hard knocks.

By the way, mentioning Facebook, Haste, Primer & Boot Loader rock. Can you make that publicly available?! Please?!

Friends

One of the great parts of a conference is the opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. I was very happy to see so many people that I only get to share virtual time with like Pete Higgins, John Resig, Brian Leroux, Jeffrey Van Gogh and a ton others. It was also amazing to meet people who I consider so incredibly talented and never thought I’d have a chance to hang with them like Dan Webb and Nicole Sullivan. Too cool.

To Kyle Simpson, thanks for spending some time talking with me at the hotel on Friday night. What a great conversation. I got see a different side of you man.

But most of all I really must thank Rebecca Murphey. Apart from putting on a great show, she truly is a wonderful person. Thanks for everything Rebecca and I will convince you South Florida is the next place to tackle.

Conference Feedback:

“briangarcia: Some random thoughts on the fantastic #TXJS . Anyone else think the event should be twice a year? http://bit.ly/dfv069”
“dcoder: Inspired by @joemccan’s #txjs talk; putting together a preso on wireframing and prototyping techniques and LoD. Now to find venues…”
“malsup: Major props to Rebecca and the yayCrew. #txjs was a first class event.”
“rogerpence: #txjs Was very cool. Crockford way cool and Resig so wise beyond his years! Other spkrs great, too. Great day! Job well done by all.”
“dstorey: Getting ready to take the Microsoft bus t @txjs. Hopefully it has hardware acceleration, but I’m not sure about the multiple engines.”

Pics from the Conference:
Courtesy Rebecca Murphey

I got some more videos edited and uploaded for you guys to check out. If you’re really into JavaScript, then you need to stay aware of what Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo! is doing. He wrote the book (literally) on JavaScript performance and he gave a presentation at the jQuery conference about that topic.

With testing becoming increasingly important for complex web apps, Menno van Slooten‘s automated UI testing framework for jQuery projects was a hit and he presented to a packed room. Ralph Whitbeck and I teamed up to do both a jQuery podcast and video interview of Menno:

After the conference and due to popular demand, Menno put his UI test framework up on GitHub.

During the jQuery conference in Mountain View, I got a chance to video interview a number of people. First up are Steve Souders, Google’s Performance Evangelist. Apart from Steve’s great comments on performance and mobile, what I truly appreciated was that I caught him just before sessions were about to start and without hesitation he took the time to speak with me. It’s a true testament to how great a guy Steve is and a lesson to all those that may be intimidated about approaching some of the stars of web development; just do it because they’re very approachable and cool!

Be sure to pick up Steve’s book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers and Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, which have become THE books to read for improving your site’s performance.

Then I spoke with Gonzalo Cordero of Yahoo! (who is also a contributor to YUI) about BayJax, the monthly meetup sponsored by Yahoo! which tackles some great front-end development discussions. Gonzalo coordinates the meetings and has made BayJax the envy of many developers with it’s great sessions. The most recent event included presentations from the authors of the new book High Performance JavaScript
.

While at JSConf 2010, I was able to interview some great developers who are really making an impact on client-side development. I’ve posted the video interviews below and I hope you like them. I want to thank all of my guests for taking the time to speak with me and share some great insights into what they’re working on.

JSConf 2010 Organizer Chris Williams

Tom Occhino & Makinde Adeagbo of Facebook

Kyle Simpson – Creator of LabJS

JSConf Interview – Kyle Simpson from Rey Bango on Vimeo.

Jeffrey Van Gogh & Matthew Podwysocki talk about RxJS – Reactive Extensions for JavaScript

Pete Higgins – Lead Developer of the Dojo Toolkit

John-David Dalton, creator of FuseJS Part 1 of 2

John-David Dalton, creator of FuseJS Part 2 of 2

Tomorrow I'll be at BarCamp Miami & will be signing up to do a presentation on the opportunities available with add-ons built on Mozilla's platform.

I've be uploaded my slides so that you can get a peak at what I'll be talking about:

If you're in the South Florida area, I would urge you to attend this great (and free) gathering. With over 500 registered, it's sure to be an excellent opportunity to learn and network.

You can register for the event here: http://barcampmiami09.eventbrite.com/