AlexAitken.net

Guiding slides for the hour-long presentation on ‘What is jQuery’ that I’ve been giving to backend teams.

It’s a fun thing to be at the fore­front of a lan­guage/tech­no­logy re­volu­tion. I’m al­ways a little amazed at how the JavaS­cript I began cod­ing ten years ago has turned in to one of the corner­stones of my ca­reer. MBAs and years on con­sensus build­ing are one thing, but it’s this lan­guage that truly brings my design work to life, from its pro­to­typ­ing stages to its full pro­duc­tion de­ploy­ment. And while I’ve forged deep­er and deep­er un­der its hood, JavaS­cript has im­plic­ated it­self fur­ther and fur­ther in mod­ern de­vel­op­ment prac­tices. JSConf 2011 brought most of the thought lead­ers re­spons­ible for this im­plic­a­tion to­geth­er for two days in Port­land, OR, in­duc­ted oth­ers in to the circle, and hummed throughout with young, fresh, en­ergy and ideas de­voted to the stand­ards lan­guage mak­ing today’s web hop. Notes on the sum­mit:

The grid-based design be­hind much of today’s web was re­vealed to me a few years back as I was serving as in-house Tech­nic­al Lead for a ma­jor cor­por­ate re­design. My team worked with de­sign­ers from an ex­tern­al agency, and as their comps star­ted com­ing across the wire it was quickly clear that visu­al com­pon­ents were be­ing aligned to a four-column grid. Every­one liked the or­der and or­gan­iz­a­tion af­forded by the grid. When it came time to turn comps in­to code we went with the 960.gs css frame­work and to this day, design and de­vel­op­ment of new solu­tions takes place with­in the con­text of the grid.

Thomas Fuchs is au­thor of the script.aculo.us user in­ter­face JavaS­cript lib­rary, a mem­ber of the Pro­to­type core team and a Ruby on Rails core alum­nus. As he puts it, ‘You’re us­ing my work every day, even if you’re not aware of it!’ His wife Amy Hoy is a de­sign­er, au­thor, and JS pro­gram­mer in her own right. To­geth­er they team to of­fer a full-day’s train­ing on ad­vanced JS de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment tech­niques that they de­liv­er via chat and video­con­fer­en­cing soft­ware from Vi­enna, Aus­tria.

In October of 2008 I attended the Ajax Experience Conference (sponsored by ajaxian.com among others) in Boston. 2009 saw a conflict between Ben and Dion and Adaptive Path’s San Francisco UX Week, which I opted for to diversify. Here, however, near its first anniversary, I share what I took from the 2008 Boston session. We’ve made progress. There’s still a way to go. And I still think UI/X is king. The excitement and challenges of a year ago:

If you’re a front-end developer heavy into JavaScript, chances are you’re used to a model of development that starts on FireFox and then branches out into other browsers once Firebug has helped with the heavy lifting. This is my model, anyway, and a standard piece of it involves saying ‘ok, that’s pretty fast, but how’s it gonna look in IE…’ The fact is that IE has a slower JS engine than its counterparts. Until today, though, I had never seen this engine truly cripple an app.

The code is the product, and it’s called ‘code’ for a reason… Not because we use it to veil messages and intentions, but because it’s only after years of diligence that that we learn to use it in ways that are transparent, interpretable, and maintainable.

The first internet revolution unfolded when we figured out how to provide things over the wire. I was working as a ‘media analyst’ at a PR research firm in 1999 when the major organizational challenge was in moving customers from a periodically-mailed software CD to a model that delivered the software and its updates in near-real-time over the web. At about the same time, I signed up for my first internet-based banking experience. This was new stuff. This was functionality from afar. We could actually go to web addresses not just for information, but to make stuff happen.