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Boston Front End Web Developers Meetup, Round #1

 

The first Boston Front End Web Developers Meetup went off this past Wednesday (May 25th) according to plan with around 30 people showing up for the inaugural meeting - I gave a couple of talks, the first was a "State of Front End Development 2011" covering the current state of the craft and talked a bit about the aims of the group. The second one covered the basics of a Semantic HTML5 Chop with some extra details on Meta-data and the Semantic Web (I believe only a couple people nodded off during that one) Both presentations are embedded at the end of this post.

I asked people to fill out a survey with a few questions - the most important of which was what topics of interest for upcoming presentation might be - here's the responses:

 

Actual Data:

Writing Semantic HTML, HTML5 101 20 69%
HTML5 & Progressive Enhancement, Shiv & Fallback Options 21 72%
Using Grids, Fixed and Fluid 17 59%
SaSS, Haml, Less 11 38%
Coding for the Mobile Web - Media queries, jQuery Touch, Mobile CSS support, etc 21 72%
Javascript, Basic (language overview) 15 52%
Javascript, Advanced (closures, namespacing, ... ) 14 48%
jQuery, Basic (jQuery 101 - Selectors, Animation, Ajax) 17 59%
jQuery, Advanced (Promises, Templating, Data elements, new features 18 62%
Client side performance optimization (CDNs, minification, async loading, spriting, ... ) 17 59%
A/B Testing 14 48%
Analytics Options 12 41%
Facebook integration, OAuth, OpenGraph, Social Widgets 18 62%
Semantic Web, RDFa, Microdata 11 38%


What I thought was interesting was: one, the number of topics that had significant interest (no topic got under 38%) and two, the level of interest in learning more about mobile. It's pretty clear that there's a lot of interest in everything HTML5 related, and additionally both a serious need for mobile development and a lack of confidence in the best practices.  

If you're in the Boston area, join us for the next Boston Front End Web Developers meetup, and if you're interested in presenting on a topic shoot me an email at pascal at this domain. 




Posted Saturday, May 28 2011 06:03 PM by Pascal Rettig | Development, HTML5, Presentation

Javascript Everyone: Online, Offline and on the Server

Presentation I gave to the MIT IAP HTML5 Game Development class on Debugging and Optimizing Javascript, Local Storage, Offline Storage and a little bit of Node.js with Web sockets




Posted Thursday, Jan 27 2011 01:35 PM by Pascal Rettig | Development, HTML5, Presentation

Vector Graphics on the Web Presentation

Presentation on the current state of Vector graphics on the Web to the January Boston ruby group. 




Posted Thursday, Jan 13 2011 03:10 PM by Pascal Rettig | HTML5, Presentation