A few days ago I was in Berlin to speak at the JSConf EU for the first time. As a topic I covered how we as a JavaScript community should be doing more to bring our knowledge out to the world and I showed off some upcoming great developer tools Mozilla is working on.

The presentation slides are available here.

The audio recording of the talk is available on archive.org.

JSConf was amazing, I had a great time and I hope I managed to inspire some people.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Save BOSS shows that a good community fights for its survival.
• Smashing magazine has a very short and concise introduction to JavaScript scope – I am missing module patterns though – would have been more useful than explaining how libraries do it.
• A great video of Bobby McFerrin showing at the world science festival that the pentatonic scale is innate knowledge to people – regardless of their cultural background.
• En-code is a very cool online tool to encode code and mask invalid characters.
• A collection of nice JavaScript driven animations and tutorials how to do them
• Vermont Scientists are trying to measure happiness using blogs and twitter as sources. They’re building a device to do so called a “Hedonometer”. Well, I am doing my bit
• A good geek explanation of Chinese characters
• Apparently you can create an online shop with Google checkout in 5 minutes haven’t tried that yet, but let’s give it a go
• Fontplore is an interface to walk through different fonts with a minority report feel to it.
• Give a geek WiiFit and he’ll try to game it, not game with it – check out what happens if you alternately play a Wii Fit character with two people with a weight difference of 100 pounds
• It is now easier to making image overlays in Google Maps with GGroundOverlay and GGeoXML
• The HTML5 group of the W3C has an interesting Web Database Draft for HTML5 – it is a SQL interface to data sources on the web, much like YQL but without the intermediate server.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Working for Lego is every kid’s dream. If you look at their ‘business cards’ you know why
• Matt Snider has information about an Apache Ant script to consolidate CSS and JavaScript in a build process – seems to be loosely connected with the work Julien Lecomte has done on the same subject
• When Mitch Haile builds his own office he doesn’t do things half-way. His office setup is impressive and bordering on the mental.
• Jane Finette of Mozilla released their community marketing guide
• The Nosh brothers have great etiquette advice what to do when someone dies during your dinner
• shlomo has a sobering thought about our lives being both empowering and pitiful