ScotlandJS was, I think, the first JavaScript conference in Scotland. It took place on Tuesday 26th July, and was a good day. So one of my usual run throughs. Links are a mix of the speakers twitter, own website, and links they mentioned in the talk.
Peter Cooper
Travelling down on the morning, I missed most of the opening keynote. Peter did a history of the language, and I caught the last ten minutes. Will have to track down the video.
| twitter.com/peterc | peterc.org |
Philip Roberts
Philip told the story of Shakey – a realtime multiplayer game based on an XML version of Macbeth. The live demo of the game worked pretty well.
It was really interesting to see how using Pusher forced an event driven design process. This focused everyone on the messages being transported from an early point. this approach seems particularly accessible for non technical participants in a project – which I need to test soon!
For the Refresh Aberdeen crowd, Shakey is like a massive ‘zone button challenge’ which cheats and has two buttons. But only two, showing the fun that can be had with a minimal interface.
| twitter.com/philip_roberts | blog.latentflip.com |
Ryan Sandor Richards
This was a good talk – plenty coverage of an area that I’ve never really looked into unless things got disastrously slow / unresponsive.
A lot of the stack we often work in is outwith our direct control by the time we pull in a stack of libraries – so implementing a lot of this might be tough without some decent refactoring – but this is probably the talk that I’ve spoken about most since Tuesday.
| twitter.com/rsandor | fastly.com |
Tane Piper
Dnode is something I’ve had a tiny look at in the past and tane’s talk really helped make sense of what we can do with it. I personally find the ‘jump feom keynote to the editor to show the code’ approach to presentation can make it difficult to follow the detail – but Tane did a good job of verbally keeping you hooked into the code. I have a couple of projects in mind for dnode now.
I also love any talk that starts with “this stuff isn’t my job, I just do it for fun”.
| twitter.com/tanepiper | tanepiper.com |
Leonardo Lanese
RWD, Mobile First and Progressive Enhancement in one talk. Leo gave a good talk. This is the day to day for me, but if you didn’t have a good background on this it gave a good outline of the issues, and a consistent point of view.
| twitter.com/leolaneseltd | leolaneseltd.com |
James Newbery
Testing JavaScript. This was a good talk, highlighting a couple of new options for testing in JS. Discussing headless browsers, browser less testing etc… Some interesting discussion of BDD and TDD.
| twitter.com/froots101 | tinnedfruit.com | busterjs.org |
Jim Weirich
I could listen to Jim Weirich all day long. Brain the size of a planet. More enthusiastic than Johnny Ball. I’m not even going to try to describe how he made lambda calculus in JavaScript fun (and funny) but track down the video when it appears.
| twitter.com/jimweirich | onestepback.org |
One more thing…
Aberdeen Javascript Meetup
Off the back of Scotland JS some twitter chat suggested there might be need for Meetup groups in Scotland focussing on JavaScript.
So if you are a JavaScript dev working in Aberdeen / ‘shire get in touch with @refreshaberdeen and we’ll get something sorted out. And we’re talking the full spectrum of JS users – from ‘I use jquery sometimes’ through to ‘my whole back end is in node.js’.
Steven Milne 