Seattle JS
Last week I attended my first SeattleJS (Javascript) event. This is an event for programmers in the tech community to get together and share knowledge around javascript.
They’ve only had 2 events so far, the first one being all about node.js (Server-side Javascript - here’s an intro talk about node ). Node.js seems to be what the Javascript community is buzzing about right now, and its impressive how quickly the # of frameworks, IRC channel conversations, and blog mentions around the topic are accelerating. Node.js is capable of handling large amounts of concurrent connections by providing non-blocking IO.I’ve been experimenting with it for some of the real-time needs of the projects I’ve been working on. Its madness when reading more about Apache how there hasn’t been innovation in the way large numbers of concurrent connections are handled (threads per connection, and processes per connection, don’t scale). Many people assume that because a solution has become standard, that its probably good enough.
Anyways, the Seattle JS event was one the best tech events I’ve attended in terms of the amount of valuable material that was covered.
I strongly recommend anyone in the area to checkout the event.
Both presenters (Ryan Johnson, Rob Duffy) did a great job of covering their topics, showing real code examples, and improved programming practices. The crowd was great too!
Rob Duffy’s presentation on high-performance JQuery was particularly useful for me. We’ve been working pretty heavily in JQuery, and it was interesting to see just how many things we are doing wrong. Rob started with some poorly written code, which was performing a cool visualization of a car moving on a track. By making a series of relatively simple changes, he managed to get the execution time from 12s down to 1s (and the code was not staged - the flaws in the code were things we do wrong all the time).
So, the lesson to take from that talk, is that it’s really important to make sure that you understand whatever framework you’re building on very well. Don’t assume that just because the framework provides you certain facilities, that you should use them without worry. The emphasis was: read the code you’re using (and also google to learn about the known problems).
Rob Duffy also mentioned that the creatir of JQuery, John Ressig, will be coming to town July 5th. Should be a great talk, and you should reserve tickets (they’re free) - check it out!
