I am currently on a trip in Singapore, Thailand and Sydney for the next 8 days and today I presented at JSConf Asia and a meetup in the Microsoft offices in Singapore.

JSConf Asia closing keynote

The closing keynote of the first day of JSConf Asia covered my worries that we are getting slightly overboard in our affection of JavaScript to solve every issue. It seems we have forgotten just how versatile a language it is and that how we use it depends very much on the environment we run it in. The slides are on SlideShare.

I also recorded a screencast of the keynote and published it on YouTube.

Microsoft Meetup

As the audience at the meetup was more mixed, and I was deadly tired, I thought it is a good plan to create a presentation that covers how we can learn JavaScript these days. It explains the use cases of it, resources how to easily run a node and express server and talks about Visual Studio Code and how to clean up old and outdated code. The learning JS meetup slides are also on Slideshare.

The screencast is on YouTube

This Thursday, my colleague Mike Harsh and Keith Rowe (@krow) from Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group invite you to the Square Pig in London for some drinks and a chat. These two program managers are leading efforts to make Windows-based machines a better place for web development.

I’ve put up a small web site with the info of the meetup and there’s also a Lanyrd page. Many thanks also to London Webstandards for banging the drum.

Whilst I am not affiliated with this group and I can’t be there as I am on my way to JSConf Asia to present, I’d love to see a lot of people go and talk to them. This is a genuine offer to improve what Windows has for web developers and I already gave them quite a bit of feedback on the matter (I am a Mac user…).

I’ve been worried about our Mac fixation as web developers for a while. We preach about supporting all platforms as “it is the web” but a lot of our tooling and best practices are very Mac/Command Line centric.

I know this is a bit last minute, but as it is with London Pubs, you have to spring a grand to get the room for the evening, so please show up and at least make sure this expense ends in the form of food and drinks inside people who Microsoft can learn from.

I spend a lot of timing giving and listening to talks at conferences and I want to point out a few here I enjoyed.

At JSConfEU this year Stefanie Grewenig and Johannes Thönes talked about offline applications:

I thoroughly and utterly enjoyed this talk. Not only because their timing worked really well and the handover from presenter to presenter went smoothly. I was most impressed to see an offline matters talk based on project/customer delivery data instead of the ones we normally get. Most offline talks explain the need, show the technology and ask for us to get cracking. This one got cracking and showed how things were done and what problems you run into.

The slides are beautiful, the storyline makes a lot of sense and at no time you feel condescended to. The talk also shows that some “impossible to use in production” technologies like DOM storage do work if you use them in a sensible fashion.

As a bonus – it has the cutest rhino at 11:55:

Double this with Nolan Lawson’s “IndexedDB, WebSQL, LocalStorage – what blocks the DOM?” and you learn a lot about local storage issues and solutions in a very short amount of time.

Thanks Stefanie, Johannes and Nolan. I feel cleverer now.