I went to the EmpireJS conference thanks to Work-Bench. It was a great first conference to be at because I consider myself an amateur javascripter so there was a lot that I could learn. Most importantly, as someone who has primarily programmed in Ruby and the Rails framework, I had only, up to this point, included jQuery in my programmer’s toolbelt. Throughout the conference, I was both amazed and excited about the potential for JavaScript moving forward. These are my three favorite talks takeaways.
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Using a styleguide helps collaboration between developers and designers. It helps create a foundation for developers and designers to discuss styles. However, at the end of the day, your styleguide is just a document that helps guide your work. In reality, people are the stylguide. Check out the full presentation here.
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Don’t be afraid of diving into a JS library that you’ve heard about, but haven’t used yet. At EmpireJS, there was an excellent and concise talk about using PhantomJS. It seems scary to use a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API, but you can do really cool things with it to automate web actions on behalf of your web app. The value added for your app seems worth the time it takes to read through the documentation.
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John Resig’s talk on Japanese Art was so cool to listen to. He wanted to create a Japanese Woodblock Print database because he liked Japanese Woodblock Prints. Through his interest in Japanese Woodblock Prints, he created a ton of open source tools like that solved a specific problem for his project, but also can be used in the open sourced community like this scraper tool. Really cool to see that working on a passion of yours can, at the same time, help the greater programming community.