I have been doing consulting or contracting (whatever you want to call it) for the past 3 years now in the St. Louis area, and I’m ready to find an AWESOME place to settle down and dig in. I don’t care much where it is, but I would prefer it to be AWESOME. I am willing to relocate.
If you read my blog, then you know the type of work I do best, so please let me know if you hear of anything AWESOME that you would like to pass on to me.
Thanks, all!
In December I’ll be giving the first Lambda Lounge talk about a non-technical topic called Humanity 2.0: how you are enabling the redefinition of “life as we know it”. There will be no code, no programming, and no algorithms — although the topic of my talk revolves heavily around technology.
Even if your grandparents had been science fiction writers, it would have been hard for them to predict how the evolution of technology played out to affect your life. You may have heard something like “Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have television”, from a sagely octogenarian when you were young. Now think about what we might be telling our great-grandchildren along the same vein.
“In my day, we didn’t have nanotechnology that allowed people to buy furniture plans out of thin air and transform their coffee tables into ottomans!”
Of course, that is just a guess. Judging from how wrong the sci-fi writers of the past predicted our future (where are my flying cars!), my statement is most likely way off. But you get the picture.
Technological evolution is a natural extension of biological evolution, and the rate of evolution in general is increasing exponentially. As in all exponential curves, there is a limit that the curve approaches, but never reaches. So what happens as the rate of evolution approaches infinity?
I’m going to talk about this idea and quite a bit about the nature of humanity and the universe in general in an attempt to put our human experience into context. I hope to emphasize the roles we are all playing as technologists in this grand scheme of things on a cosmic scale.
Hope to see you there!
I really wish I could have attended both days of the Strange Loop conference. Judging from the time I was there, I’m sure things were very fun on the first day, especially the party and Strange Passions session at Blueberry Hill afterward.
Here are the slides from my presentation:
I got a lot of very nice comments on the presentation, including 3 people who told me that I convinced them to use jQuery on their next projects! Thank you for all your encouragement, and I hope jQuery fits your UI needs. You can see the live examples I was showing here, or check them out from github here.
The best thing about Strange Loop is that DZone was there, and they taped most of the presentations! So soon (not sure when) I’ll post up the video of my talk.
I got a good response from the GrailsUI presentation, and hopefully we may get a few more developers interested in joining up to help with GrailsUI development. I tried to convince people to learn JavaScript as usual. All my code examples are available on github here.
This presentation also went very well. Code samples are here.
The conference itself was excellent. I met a lot of smart, interesting, and fun people I’ve been working with over the net for years. Thank you to everyone who took the time out to say hello and chat. What a great bunch of developers.I got to sit and have drinks with Jeff Brown and Graeme Rocher and talk about the future of Grails. And I also had etoufee with Guillaume LaForge, Dave Klein, and Paul King. Not to mention the oysters with Daniel Honig, Nathan Neff, Colin Harrington, and Hamlet D’Arcy. I also sat at the conference at the same tables as Rod Johnson, Scott Vlaminck, Scott Davis, and Hans Dockter.
Did I miss anyone?
You website will suck without a fluid, usable UI. Your UI will suck without a rich, maintainable interface. Your programmers will suck if you don’t give them the tools they need to build the UI you need.
JavaScript has gotten a bad rap. The browser has become a first class application environment, and JavaScript is the leading platform within the browser for rich applications. Sprinkled throughout the web, there is a ton of unmaintainable, unreadable, buggy legacy JavaScript code, acting as very bad examples of client side programming. Many times, a software engineer’s first introduction to JavaScript involves this ugly code. As JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford says, “Most of the people writing in JavaScript are not programmers”, and this misrepresents the JavaScript language. So, sometimes backend programmers disregard JavaScript because of its inaccurate portrayal by script kiddies. Then the UI languishes, or is written by programmers that just want to find a quick way to make a library do what they want and move on.
Client programming deserves just as much attention as backend programming.
jQuery is a tool created by good software engineers that applies modern and correct software paradigms to the DOM-JavaScript relationship. It can help you produce an elegant, functional, maintainable UI — and most importantly give your users an excellent experience with much less effort than other JavaScript libraries.
In this presentation, we will explore the web and the role that JavaScript has played it in. We’ll talk about how JavaScript was used in the early days of the internet, and how it is being used now. Web 2.0 applications with rich user interfaces must think of their Client Tier (the browser) as a first-class application environment itself in order to give UI developers the resources they need to rock their UIs and keep their users involved and active within the communities they want to create.
Today’s AJAX environment is a new playing field for JavaScript, and jQuery is playing a major role on the field. It provides a JavaScript toolbox that is unobtrusive, functional, and pragmatic above all else. jQuery just gets things done in a way no other library today can do.
After an introduction to the environment for jQuery, I will be talking about the features of the library and giving code examples of jQuery tools being used at some of the best-designed sites and frameworks on the web today: Netflix, Google, Digg, Dell, Wordpress, Drupal, CBS, NBC, Technorati, etc.
I hope to see you at the conference, but you had better register soon. I hear it is going to sell out.
