Random thoughts on TXJS

Thinketh has been much more of a photo blog lately, but I had such a blast at TXJS I felt I had to share. Here are some random thoughts on the event held this past weekend in Austin.

• Tom Hughes-Croucher’s session on YUI + Node.js was the most entertaining speaker of the day with his Unicorn on Narwhal slides, code Rick Rolls and most of all comic-sans-ed slides.

  “I can do the whole thing in comic sans, and you’ll still gonna come away loving it.” -Tom Hughes-Croucher

• Node.js was the darling of the day with Croucher and Tim Caswell showing off some fun demos.
• Paul Irish’s talk on digging into jQuery brought up some useful ideas. It also introduced me to the following syntax for self-invoking functions that I wasn’t aware of

  !function(){//Self invoking code}();

• Tom Occhino from Facebook was another session that I enjoyed. He gave the crowd the lowdown on some of their in-house systems like Primer and Quickling. Something to think about whenever I have a team of 300 engineers.
• I was a bit surprised to see a CSS session at a JS conference, but Nicole Sullivan’s talk on Massive CSS Mistakes was one of the most immediately relevant sessions and sent me home with actionable items.
• Kyle Simpson introduced a new middle-end layer. Still wrapping my head around that idea but I’ll give it a whirl along with his BikeChainJS.
• Mac Book Pros dominated the conference. Saw a smattering of iPads and a couple individuals taking notes with old school pen & paper.
• iPhones were the norm with android phones sprinkled in.
• Lunch was delicious, but layout of said lunch was befuddling to say the least.
• I recorded all of my sessions and took notes using SoundPaper on the iPad. After a full’s day of recording and tweeting, I was around 50% of battery life. Pretty impressive, but would definitely like to hear what other people were using to record and take notes.