Falsy Values 2011 - True Javascript Event
Posted by Łukasz Anwajler
Posted in:
Events,
JavaScript
Last weekend I managed to attend Falsy Values - a first truly Javascript event organised in Poland I was aware of - I’m quite young so I could miss some before :)
Falsy Values consisted of two-day workshops and one conference day. During workshops one could choose from JavaScript basics, game development, building desktop applications, test-driven JavaScript development and server-side JavaScript - Node.js.
I was excited to try Node.js for some time, so it was really easy choice for me. I joined Tom Hughes-Croucher to learn about one of the most promising technologies in Web environment.
Tom a.k.a. sh1mmer introduced basic concepts behind Node and then he focused on teaching us about event-loop, event-driven development, MVC in server-side JavaScript and so on. Every part of the course was followed by exercises with ascending complexity. It was really amazing that we started by writing “Hello world” scripts and ended with HTTP proxies or Chat client/server applications. I was completely satisfied with workshop, Tom is fantastic speaker and very helpful person.
After intense Node.js learning - conference seemed to be a little bit too calm. Anyway, there were three talks I really liked. Zbigniew Braniecki (Mozilla) talked about JIT compilation - it was first time I heard about JavaScript Just In Time compilation details so I was content. Tom’s short talk about Node.js was rather overview of technology, I enjoyed that as well. And the last talk I liked was Brian Leraux with Phonegap. Well, this guy is totally crazy. He had the most vigorous presentation and similarly to Tom - he was live-coding. I like that kind of stuff!
I need to admit that I was quite disappointed by Tantek Çelik’s talk about CASSIS which is some JavaScript/PHP comments coding. Okay - it was innovative approach, but for me it’s just an art for art's sake. For example in Rails we have Client side validations based on Rails model validation. On the other hand if we’re talking about writing in one language in frontend and backend - mentioned before Node.js already does that perfectly. I think that talk was the worse part of the conference.
Summing up, Falsy Values brought many JavaScript ninjas to Warsaw and praised be they - people responsible for that. I learned a lot, spent time with awesome people and came back with great inspiration. Thanks and see you next time!
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