DC Meetup Videos

We held the first in a series of meetups that will happen in the DC/NoVA area last week, a sprout of our Baltimore area Meetup for our southern friends, and I have to say that it was a huge hit. The meetups are going to be managed by Pat Sheridan from Three Pillar Global, and we are hoping it will be a way to get JavaScript developers from the DC area more involved in the community. Jay was kind enough to bring video equipment and record our presentations, along with editing the videos and posting them to the intertubes.

There are some photos and other information about the event on its meetup page.

If you are in the Baltimore area and into JavaScript with a fury, you should visit our Meetup that happens the first Wednesday of each month at 6:30PM in the Beehive Baltimore. This month’s meetup has a presentation from Paul Barry about Node.js – it’s gonna be bad ass.

Speed Testing

My little addiction I like to call speed testing has rolled into full swing. Now that I have the tools in place to create and launch tests, along with run reporting on the results with ease, I can pretty much just sit down and spend 30 minutes or so to design and launch the test. I have two tests currently gathering data, one is testing the speed of rendering an image with and without a data URL, the other has to do with the speed of code wrapped in a try catch statement. Should be some interesting results, which I will be posting a summary on soon. My first test was for JSON decoding speed, which I posted results for a couple of weeks ago.

HtmlEditor Plugins

The Ext JS team has expressed an interest in including my HtmlEditor Plugins as a UX in the SDK. This will mark the third development of mine that has become part of the Ext JS SDK download, first it was the GMapPanel UX, then the Grid Filter backend PHP code, now it seems that the Ext JS SDK will finally come with a more robust HtmlEditor example. A few updates have been committed recently that add the option to change the language in these plugins, along with some general code cleanup. Also starting to move my code over to Github as suggested by many.

Books

Soon we will have Jay Garcia’s Ext JS in Action book released in print, and the 2nd edition of Learning Ext JS should be released later this year, titled “Learning Ext JS 3.0″. Cutter, Colin and I got together to update the book, fix some errors, and add new chapters to take advantage of new features in Ext JS 3.0. It’s gonna be an awesome resource for anyone just getting started with Ext JS.

JSConf

Again, JSConf is being held in the DC area, which makes it incredibly cheap for me to attend, but this year I decided to try my hand at submitting a talk proposal. I can’t wait to find out if I will be chosen. My submission was for an introduction to rapid application prototyping using the Ext JS library. Here is my submission:

{<br /> “name”:”Shea Frederick”,<br /> “email”:”________@________.com”,<br /> “twitter”:”VinylFox”,<br /> “location”:”Baltimore, MD”,<br /> “topic_title”:”Rapid Web Application Development with Ext JS”,<br /> “topic_description”:”Discuss general principles of the Ext JS library<br /> and show how easy it can be to rapidly prototype a web application<br /> using the library.”,<br /> “claim_to_fame”:”One of the core contributors to the Ext JS library<br /> along with other Open Source JavaScript projects. Author of<br /> ‘Learning Ext JS’ published in December 2008. Observed ‘Talk Like<br /> a Pirate Day’. Maintain a Blog of JavaScript fun at<br /> http://www.vinylfox.com”<br /> }

Did I mention that all submissions have to be in the form of valid JSON? Yeah, geeky, but good – very good. With any luck, I will find out later this week if ive been accepted.

JSMag’s blog post outlined their reasoning and intentions with this new piece:

…some of the feedback received has led us to introduce a new column this month. A recurring piece of feedback so far has been that much of the content appeared to be more advanced than many readers felt they could deal with. To that end, we’re introducing a new writer and column to our line up – Shea Frederick.

JSMag Editor

My first piece went out in the July issue of JSMag, and other than complaints from non Steelers fans (you know who you are) I was very happy with the resulting article.

Shea will be covering topics of interest to developers new to JavaScript, and perhaps even new to programming in general. His first piece this month is “Choosing a JavaScript Library” which can help someone new to the JavaScript scene understand the various options and make an informed decision.

JSMag Editor

Looking forward to increasing JavaScript’s stranglehold on the world!! muhahaha!!! (evil laugh)

ExtJS Themes

Ive been playing with ExtJS themes lately, and im having a blast creating some very fancy looking stuff. It really is amazing how quickly you can make ExtJS widgets not look like ExtJS widgets anymore. Goodbye default theme.

Keep an eye out here for stuff to do with creating themes for ExtJS, you will not be disappointed.

JavaScript User Group

The Baltimore/DC area is a hotbed of IT work. A good portion of the work here is web related, and a chunk of that of course is JavaScript related, so for the past six months I have been hosting a JavaScript meetup group in Columbia, MD (halfway between Baltimore and the District). I have throughly enjoyed meeting people in my field, and discussing various things which are most often, but not always related to JavaScript.

Our next meetup on August 4th has a local JavaScript guru Lokesh Dhakar giving us his insights into user interaction. Please come out and join us if your in the area, we always have a great mix of local badasses and newbies show up. A few local business pitch in to make this happen every month, OmniTI provides our meeting space, and Mind Over Machines keeps our bellies full of pizza – thanks goes out to both of them.

For our first meeting we have a presentation on ExtJS by Jay Garcia, which many of you likely know from his active participation in the ExtJS forums, educational screencasts and plugins/extensions.  The meeting is taking place in Columbia, which is roughly between Baltimore and DC.

If your interested please sign up for the meetup group to show your support, and if you would like to attend let us know your coming by RSVP’ing on the meetup page.

http://www.meetup.com/baltimore-dc-javascript-users/

Hope to see you there!

Here is a quote from Peter’s blog about the event:

“At our first meetup, we talked about EXT some and also raffled off a copy of the new ExtJS book called Learning Ext JS generously given to us by one of the authors, Shea Frederick. We also talked about things we could do together as a group. For our first group project, we decided to work on the sessions page of Silicon Valley Code Camp (the site I wrote) and make that page EXTd. We broke down parts of that into little pieces and each of us went home with a small assignment to work on. We plan on meeting again January 20th, 2009 and continue the fun.”

If anyone else is interested in hosting an ExtJS meetup in their area, im sure we can work out a deal to provide a book for raffling off at your event. I am hoping that we can get something like this together for the Baltimore/Washington area soon, so everyone keep your eye out for news about that. I know many of you in the area are already excited about the prospect of this happening (Jay, that means you!)

UPDATE: It official now, http://www.meetup.com/baltimore-dc-javascript-users/