Firefox Developer Edition

In my most recent talk at jQuery Chicago, I spoke about the promising future of debugging that involved the Firefox Tools Adapter which is a brilliant step forward in the world of remote debugging.

This was under the radar until the day before my talk when it was announced on the Mozilla Hacks blog. So it suddenly became a bit more mainstream. 

Yesterday Mozilla has teased a developer focused version of Firefox they have codenamed #fx10 in a theatrical-like trailer. I for one am excited to see what sort of product arrives with this new browser.

So it turns out that this Firefox Developer Edition will be a replacement for the current Aurora Channel. What it will bring is a separate profile so it can run alongside the stable version of Firefox without having to mess with custom profiles. It will have easy access to developer tools, and looks as though the Firefox Tools Adapter will be built in to the product directly. This is a great advancement for those looking to use the cutting edge developer tools from Firefox on the web

jQuery Mobile

I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak at several jQuery Conferences in the past two years. The focus of most of my talks, and most of my day-to-day work actually, is based around building mobile web applications with jQuery Mobile and Cordova, two wonderful open source projects. During these conferences I was able to meet and get to know many new friends and fellow developers, including many of the folks on the jQuery team. Eventually, while in Vienna at jQuery Europe I was talking with Alex, the lead of jQuery Mobile and he suggested that I start contributing to the project.

I have been fortunate enough to have an employer who is generous enough to allow my some time to donate to the project and I have been contributing through bug-triage, pull requests, and generally just trying not to get in the way since March of this year. I have already learned a ton and am always encouraged by the support of the jQuery team and the advice they give.

Yesterday - 6 October 2014 - I was officially made a member of the jQuery Team. I am honored to have this opportunityand am excited to join the team of people whom I have come to know over the past two years. I am also pretty excited about the opportunity to continue to do what I have been doing all this year, just now I have access to the GitHub repositories.

Node.js Recipes Screencast Edition

Last year, I wrote Node.js Recipes in a relatively short time span. It was accomplished in something like 120 days, or about 10 days per chapter. This was exhausting and I vowed to my wife that I would not write another book at that pace again.

Then I was tempted. My publisher asked me if I had interest in several titles, and man did I, but after a couple days of deliberating over each one - I could not commit to the time frame.

Then came an introduction from someone within the publisher’s organization that proposed I create a screencast series based upon the book which I had already written. This was something I could get on board with because the material was already written (right?).

So I created a sample video for evaluation and we decided to move forward with another aggressive schedule to record ~6 hours of screencast based upon material in my book.

It turns out this was a pretty agressive and time consuming undertaking as well. Sure the material was already written, but it needed to be reworked into a standard Powerpoint format and of course I would need to be coding most of the stuff I’d already written again. All of this (with the exception of creating some of the powerpoints) was a great time and I enjoyed being able to revisit my book from an angle of a user or reader, rather than an author.

In the end I recorded nearly 12 hours of raw footage for the video which is being post-processed currently and should see release in the near future (no official date that I know of yet - stay tuned for that). The team at Apress has done a fantastic job with the final editing and composition, from what I have seen and I look forward to everyone getting the opportunity to check out the finished product when it is available.

The Winter of jQuery

This winter I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at two jQuery events - First in jQuery Conference in San Diego, then in Vienna for jQuery Europe.  The traveling is always great, and these events were top notch as far as organization, content, and attendees.

While I always enjoy attending conferences, these two seemed to be extra engaging in that the attendees I talked with all brought a great deal of encouragement and excitement to continue to share what they know and learn.

I was also able to spend more time with a few of the folks I have met from the jQuery team and really see the vision of where some of the projects are headed. From this, I have even started to spend some time trying to triage and/or fix issues on the jQuery Mobile project.

In any case, here are the slides and video for my presentations about building $.Widgets for both UI and Mobile.

Book Review: Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript

I just finished reading another fantastic resource for JavaScript developers "Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript" written by Nicholas C. Zakas. 

Nicholas C. Zakas is an excellent Front-End developer, and what I have always enjoyed about his work, is his ability to clearly articulate his knowledge to developers of all skill levels. Because of this I had high expectations for reading this book. I'm happy to say that this book did not disappoint.

The book, to me, is an reference I will keep with me throughout my JavaScript career, and I'll recommend it to any developer interested in JavaScript. Targeted toward JavaScript beginners, this book highlights areas that many who are new to JavaScript will likely have to learn the hard way, or discover after they have reached a level of frustration that makes them decide to hate JavaScript forever.

Now, this does not mean that this book contains some secret recipe to JavaScript Zen, but it does provide all the necessary tools for the reader (Seasoned JavaScripter or one who is new JS) to understand how to build great applications with JavaScript. The topics - functions, objects, prototypes, inheritance - are all covered thoroughly through well though out examples which are not too complex for even a new developer to follow. These examples and explanations are accompanied with wonderful notes and snippets that signal the voice of the seasoned JavaScript professional that Nicholas C. Zakas is. As I wrote above, I definitely recommend this book.