For most of Howard’s 6 year developer career, JavaScript programming has been an everyday thing. He’s been lucky enough to work on projects that were highly coupled to Prototype and jQuery before the libraries had good test coverage for IE6. This gave Howard the opportunity to become very familiar with the internals of those libraries and over time he was able to master the internals and was able to contribute some patches back.
The Art of Releasing a jQuery Plugin + Next Gen JavaScript
After a massively successful SXSW Party last month, we are back on track with our regular scheduled monthly meetup. For April, we have a brief yet insightful presentation by a local, Howard Rauscher on developing 3rd party JavaScript widgets and we'll talk more about the IE9 Developer contest, Dev Unplugged.
Recently he started working at a new startup called Mass Relevance which provides social media curation and visualizations to media companies such MTV, New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN . One of his primary roles has been to ensure that their JavaScript widgets don't break across majors browsers on customer websites. Howard's presentation will consist of walking through a simple jQuery plugin (line-by-line), talking about the art of releasing a jQuery plugin and peeking at some real-world use cases. Noobs and experts will both benefit!
We will also discuss the IE9 developer contest, Dev Unplugged, which was announced at the Austin JS SXSW Party last month. Dev Unplugged is not a just a contest where you can win thousands of dollars in prizes, but it also a way for developers to really explore what is possible with HTML5 and modern web browsers. As if you needed a reason to be trying out the latest and greatest, Dev Unplugged will reward you for doing so!
Since Austin is the Live Music Capital of the World, the IE9 team has enticed us to do something cool with the HTML5 Music capabilities. Here are some ideas to get you going:
http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/2011/03/music-visualizer-in-html5-js-with-source-code.html
http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/
http://always-beautiful.bigspaceship.com
Dev Unplugged has a music category for the best “music experience”. Developers may use their own legally licensed music or the the IE9 Team has provided two tracks for you to experiment with: “Sail” by AWOLNATION and “Boy” by RaRaRiot. Read more about it here:
http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/unplugged/categories/music
Special Update
Last minute special guests are always welcome at the Austin JavaScript Meetup and this month, we have an extra special guest from the Mozilla team: David Herman.
David's a member of Ecma TC39, the committee designing future versions of the JavaScript language standard. The Ecma committee is hard at work on the design of the next version of JavaScript. David will present some highlights of the cool features we can expect in the future of JavaScript.
Of course we still have everything in store for you as previously planned, but now with some lagniappe!
Of course we will followup all of this up with our wildly crowd-pleasing roundtable of JavaScript-related questions. This is an open forum to present topics of discussion in a rapid-fire manner or simply heckle @joemccann.
