Introduction to React

A few months ago I was approached by my editor from Node.js Recipes to discuss the possiblity of writing another book. This coincided with a time where I had been spending time working with React for side projects, and it just so happened that the title which I would be writing is Introduction To React.



 So I decided to write the book and spent the next 11 weeks writing it. I am currently finishing up the edits and the book is due to be published in September. I'll be sure to update as the publication date approaches.

dev.Objective()

Every time I attend a conference or get bogged down following all the new tools and frameworks that are coming out in the front-end development world (which seems to happen daily) - I decide that I want to write a talk about how we as developers can optimize our front-ends without rewriting everything from scratch.  I finally was able to get an abstract for a talk that will address such things written a month or so ago. I then decided to submit this talk to DevObjective, a conference happening in Minnesota in May. I feel that this talk might hit well with the audience as one of the things that stood out for me from the conference site was the following sentence:

Cutting edge stuff is awesome, but most people are more concerned about getting their jobs done now

I feel that this hits home with me, as I love to just be able to get my job done now.  I'm not saying that we can't enjoy the advances made by new and modern frameworks, even if we are working on a years/or decades old project, but we can make smart choices to modernize our applications. Luckily my talk was accepted and I'll be speaking about "Front-end Modernization for Mortals" in May  at Dev Objective.

I'm excited to be joining a group of speakers who will be discussing a wide variety of topics from which any developer should be able to gain some valuable knowledge for their daily jobs. If these sound like something you would be interested in, you should join me at the conference in May!

At the time of this writing, there is still time for the early bird pricing if you click the banner below:

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.