O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo

Today was the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center in Manhattan. Today was "Workshop Day" and that's what I thought looked the most applicable for me, I have a feeling the expo will be filled with things like this so I would be more productive at work. The conference was cool, there were SOME nerds which was awesome. I heart nerds that wear backwards baseball caps and dirty jeans and lean back in their chairs and don't care what you think, because if I was a guy that's how I would be. Plus I would skateboard. Not saying girls can't skateboard, because they totally can, but I digress. I met a few cool nerds, and think I made some friends.

There were also a bunch of people walking around loudly talking on their cell phones saying things like "Really? Did you check to make sure the blog was published? Ok, well then you should definitely twitter about it and post a bulletin. Ok, then check the adsense and call me back." BLECH. I'm SO on Web 5.0 at this point. My Space is SO the AOL of 2002 I'm deleting mine this week I'm almost embarrassed to be there. Twitter : Internet as DVR : Television, it just is. Developers need to come up with some anti-Web 2.0 terminology ASAP.

This morning I went to a talk about "Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications," it basically reinforced in my mind that 'm doing the right thing. S3, REST, JSON, CSS, XHTML, AJAX, JQuery... the whole she-bang. It got me feeling pretty confident that I was keeping on top of things, however, I didn't learn much. This afternoon, however, was totally worth it. I went to a talk for Developers (which there were hardly any at all as seen here):

About Advanced Javascript given by this guy (PS, I just noticed, um he only MADE JQuery), is it weird that I decided his talk would be interesting because he had cool glasses? I think he may have skipped fourth period health to give this talk, I can say that because not 3 months ago my orthodontist asked me what grade I was in.... (it's like when you make racial jokes about your own race). Not only was the teaching tool he used awesome (See? You can edit and debug(kinda) and compile) but I learned a lot that I really want to play with. Javascript is like a mountain, once you conquer it you think it's awesome, but if it's in your way you abhor it. People that are good at JS freaking love it, and wouldn't live without it... but getting to that point is rough because of limited debugging resources and other languages that offer more functionality (because regardless of how fast the client is, the server has just so much more info) tend to be distracting.

So I learned about Javascript caching, which is cool. Basically what you have to do is declare a function's cache, like so:

Add.cache = {};

Then set it within a function like this:

                                                                                       
function Add(num){  
if(Add.cache[num] != null)
return Add.cache;
var ber;
ber = num + 1337;
Add.cache[num] = ber;
return ber;
}

then you can call the cache if the variable passed in is the same, through the cache.

assert(Add(3) == 1340, 'YAAAAY');

assert(Add.cache[3] == 1340, 'YerAwesome');

For small functions like this it means nothing... but when you're holding up processes with your insane JS calls this is super handy. I also learned about OO Javascript, and inheritance, and recursion (the only thing I was already aware of) and all sorts of fun things. I will do a more indepth post at a later date.

It never fails, though, at these talks there are always guys that ask questions just to ask them. Kind of like "stump the speaker" where they already know the answer but they are asking to see if HE knows the answer. This would be fine in moderation but when it happens over and over it's a bit annoying.

While I was in the shower the Mets decided to finish their nap, so the game is over. Now it's time for The Shield and 90210 (I don't even want to hear it that show is AWESOME). My card for Thursday this week starts my study on LINQ for filesystem. It looks hella useful and if it is I will make sure to tell you all about it.

ALSO, if anyone else is having trouble with their OpenId on StackOverflow (Technorati) please let me know, I can't log in, I'm experiencing analphylatic shock, I thought if there were a bunch of us we may be able to get the attention of the overseers.