Every once and a while I like to post a summary of what Ive been up to lately. The past few months have been busy, so I have a ton to talk about, but I will try to summarize.

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:

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

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.