Async

#50: CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices

2012-05-16T17:36:42Z

Thurs, 14th June 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

In the early days of CSS the web industry cut its teeth on blogs and small personal sites. Much of the methodology still considered best-practise today originated from the experiences of developers working alone, often on a single small style sheet, with few of the constraints that come from working with large distributed teams on large continually changing web projects.

The mechanics of CSS are relatively simple. But creating large maintainable systems with it is still an unsolved problem. For larger sites, CSS is a difficult and complex component of the codebase to manage and maintain. It’s difficult to document patterns, and it’s difficult for developers unfamiliar with the code to contribute safely.

How can we do better? What are the CSS best practises that are letting us down and that we must shake off? How can we take a more precise, structured, engineering-driven approach to writing CSS to keep it bug-free, performant, and most importantly, maintainable?

Andy is a developer from the UK. He currently works as a software architect at the Guardian in London. Formerly at Clearleft, Microsoft and Multimap where he worked on projects for the BBC, Mozilla, Gumtree and Channel 4.

Over the years he’s worked on web projects for the BBC, Mozilla, Sony, Ebay, Vodafone, Fontdeck, Multimap, and many others.

#49: Hypermedia APIs & JavaScript Applications

2012-05-16T17:37:04Z

Thurs, 24th May 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

In this session, we take a look through the process of building a rich full-stack Javascript application, API-first.

Local polyglot developer, Tom Parslow (@almostobsolete), will demonstrate how building a RESTful API as a base can have some surprising, positive effects on the design of a system. As a case study, he’ll show us around an application he built with Dharmafly that serves a self-describing API with a full-stack JavaScript app, built using Node.js, Backbone CoffeeScript and CouchDB.

Brandwatch is sponsoring Async for April & May

2012-04-12T19:06:54Z

The very lovely Brandwatch, a social analytics company from Brighton, is sponsoring the Async developer community for the months of April and May!

We recently posted about wanting to invest in our community and its activities, so our huge thanks go out to Brandwatch for blazing the trail. The timing is perfect, since Brandwatch’s app falls under the scrutiny of tonight’s case study of JavaScript application architecture. And for budding JavaScripters, the company have some excellent local job openings (see below).

Who is Brandwatch?

Brandwatch crawls the internet, archiving over 50 million instances of social media data every day. Users of the service can search via a web interface for mentions of their brand or keyword, either past mentions or to track future occurrences, using a sophisticated query creation process.

The Brandwatch app includes an advanced suite of features that allows data to be chopped and sliced to provide insights, graphing, categorisation, geolocation, metadata and countless other components.

Understanding and monitoring a brand is just the start: Brandwatch also lets people engage with the communities they have identified, responding to, assigning workflow and managing social media mentions with ease.

Brandwatch is the perfect platform to make sense of the chatter about a brand online.

Jobs with Brandwatch

Brandwatch is recruiting JavaScript developers of all levels. They are interested in people with a good understanding of OO principles and the MVC pattern, with a strong grasp of JavaScript fundamentals.

TDD/BDD experience is a massive plus, as is experience of contributing to open source projects. Some commercial experience is essential for mid/senior roles, but they are interested to hear from graduates (or soon-to-be-graduates) looking for a junior role.

Apply within…

Straight from the horse’s mouth

A number of the Brandwatch developer team are Async regulars, so feel free to quiz them on their experiences:

Steve Mason: @spmason / github.com/spmason/
Graham Scott: @grahamscott / github.com/grahamscott/
Dan Neame: @cham / github.com/cham/
Jon Miles: @jonathanmiles
Alastair Lockie: @larister
(These are personal accounts, so may not represent the views of the company – you know the score).

The official accounts are @brandwatch / github.com/brandwatchltd

More info

Sponsorship

If you are interested in sponsoring a month or more of Async, please read the details and get in touch with us.

Sponsor Us

2012-04-24T11:00:32Z

Async is now completing its second year of twice monthly JavaScript events, and we want to build on our successes. We are looking for companies or individuals who would like to sponsor Async each month, allowing us to invest in our community.

What is the sponsorship for?

We would like to be able to pay someone in the community to assist with event promotion and management, to record, edit and publish a podcast of audio/video recordings for the wider web(let us know if you could be that person, or have some other ideas).

We would like to be able to cover travel and accommodation for our out-of-town speakers and to purchase equipment, such as a camcorder, tripod, projector, microphone, cables and more.

Why sponsor?

By sponsoring Async, you support our grassroots efforts and develop a closer relationship with our community – just as the Guardian did when they sponsored our early months.

If you are potentially interested, we can send you details of our sponsorship packages and tell you about all the benefits. Please email us at hello@asyncjs.com

Thanks. We look forward to partnering with you.

#48: AngularJS – Testability in mind

2012-05-11T18:08:07Z

Thurs, 10th May 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

Angular teaches your old browser new tricks. It is what HTML would have been had it been designed for building web-applications.

Angular is radical because it eliminates boilerplate code with declarative rather than imperative syntax. Having an awesome framework is not enough; one needs to have easy testability, since this is the easiest way to develop and maintain big apps. In this session, we will focus on how AngularJS makes applications a joy to test and look at how Angular compares to other web application toolkits, like Backbone, Ember and Knockout.

Vojta Jína is originally from the Czech Republic, and currently a software engineer at Google, Mountain View. He is a big fan of Test Driven Development and open source projects. In free time, he really enjoys music, especially playing trumpet and collects speeding tickets.

Update: slides and resources online

Slides from the talk – use Canary Chrome for hardware acceleration
AngularJS links
The app we made
Angular tutorial – highly recommended

#47: 2nd Birthday Show n’ Tell

2012-04-19T15:55:49Z

Thurs, 26th April 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

It’s been two years since Async kicked off. To celebrate our birthday, we’d like to bring together some quickfire demos of your latest projects, experiments or newfound techniques (in the realm of JavaScript, HTML5 and the like): 5 minutes for a demo, 3 minutes for questions.

Would you like to grab a slot? Get some inspiration from our past show n’ tells, and let us know in the comments to this post.

#46: Architecture of a JavaScript Application

2012-03-22T16:41:45Z

Thurs, 12th April 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

Join us for a tour of a real-world JavaScript application. For the best part of a year, the team at Brandwatch have been rewriting their legacy JavaScript front-end, relying heavily on Backbone, RequireJS and Jasmine to get the job done, as well as some NodeJS magic.

Learn the tools and concepts behind these new shiny frameworks, as well as what lessons were learned from maintaining a legacy application collapsing under the weight of its own design choices.

Steve Mason (@spmason) is a JavaScript Developer at Brandwatch. He’s a regular contributor to various open source projects and is preparing to release Brandwatch’s first proper JavaScript library – tabler.

#45: EyebrowJS — A discussion on realtime, multi-device, rich-client applications

2012-03-29T15:16:14Z

Thurs, 22nd March 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

Single-page apps are the new black. But how do you build a website that can do server-side rendering while also being a single-page app on the client-side?

EyebrowJS is the template and UI system used at State, a London-based startup building a global opinion network. It’s used for server-side rendering from a Node.js server and client-side magic, including managing UI, animations, page transitions and reactive data-binding. We’ll discuss how Eyebrow is architected and what it means for web application development.

Mark Wubben is a web hacker at State, hailing from the Continent. You may want to follow him on Twitter as @novemberborn or his never-updating blog at novemberborn.net.

Update: slides online

Mark’s slides are online here.

#44: AliceJS – CSS animations for apps & games

2012-03-29T16:38:12Z

Thurs, 15th March 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

AliceJS is an open source JavaScript library to create advanced animations with CSS. It’s self-contained and works directly against the DOM to support a variety of use cases for web applications.

With one line of JavaScript, you can make almost any DOM elements swerve around the page, yet retain control over the animation’s parameters. The framework also introduces the concept of Organics, adding randomisation characteristics to create visual effects that are subtly different each time. Useful for games and business apps alike, AliceJS can bring freshness and polish to your work in a very simple and straightforward manner.

Laurent Hasson is the Technical Director responsible for driving strategy, architecture, open source and community relationships around Research In Motion‘s Web Platform. At RIM, he’s been focusing on WebKit, WebWorks, Ripple and experimental projects such as AliceJS. He’s been deep in web technologies since the mid 90′s and is an avid JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Java and SQL developer. He codes and watches at least two movies every day (and has funny hair).

Update: slides online

Laurent’s slides are available to download, as a PDF..

#43: Introduction to jQuery Plugin Development

2012-03-09T10:05:18Z

Thurs, 8th March 2012 (arrive from 7.15pm for a 7.45pm start). Free entry.
@The Skiff, 6 Gloucester Street, Brighton, BN1 4EW. (map)

→ Sign up to the event on Lanyrd

Perhaps you’ve been using jQuery for a while now but have yet to write or even appreciate the need to write a plugin. This session sets out to introduce you to jQuery plugin development, why you might want to consider it, how to get started and what the benefits are.

Alistair Macdonald will lead the session, dealing with questions such as:

What does it mean to have a plugin?
What’s so good about jQuery plugins?
What are some practical examples?
How do I create a plugin? (Live coding!)
What do I need to bear in mind when I create one?
Great! So, I made a plugin. Should I share it with others? How should I do that?
When shouldn’t I create a jQuery plugin and simply create a useful script that has a jQuery dependency?

Ali is a local freelance JavaScript and PHP developer, and a coordinator at Async.

Links

The slides and example plugin from the talk are now available online.