MadZak

Today was an interesting day. I was personally really excited about today because it was Node Day! In the morning I heard talks from some very high profile node community folks which was really awesome. Then Ryan the author of node stood up and explained how 0.50 is going live and it'll have the first cut at a new backend which will allow node to work natively in windows. He showed some preliminary numbers about performance (linux vm was still kicking windows ass of course) and all was good. Suddenly the talk turned into what I hate the most... Microsoft.

A great question was asked of Ryan about what is Microsofts involvement with node and why are they so focused on "partnering" with them. This annoucement came out about 3 months ago on how Microsoft really wants to help a node.js port occur. Helping a language onto a platform is fine with me, it's the underpinnings i'm worried about. If you haven't heard windows is also pushing javascript as the new windows 8 language for applications in it's fancy new touch mode. Suddenly the light clicked on and I made the connection

Ryan dodged the question about Microsofts involvement (I hate jQuery because of this as well btw) and one of this corporate buddies jumped in about how they can't really speak for Microsoft and that the partnership will explain itself soon. Basically a corporate answer. The next part is what really sealed the deal. Given IE's horrible support for javascript and web standards alone i'd figure that most people in the talk wouldn't be windows boys (naive i know). Turns out 2/3's were folks FROM Microsoft and even went on to explain how they are all starting to integrate node into windows software.

I feel cheated honestly. Javascript is such a wonderful language with some emmense power but given the recent trademarking over node, the logo redesign (stupid btw), and now this partnership, I do not feel that this language will be cared for like a python is... by the community. Given this new view, I skipped the last half of the node.js day and switched over to advanced vim. BEST DECISION EVER

I'm actually writing this post in vim and using a python function to send it off to my blog (geek cred +1). I learned a crap load and hopefully i can start becoming a new master in the world of vim and drop IDE's forever. I really hate IDE's as well so it's a natural choice back to a plain editor that has so much hacker potential. Day 3 is 100% python focused which will be awesome, looking forward to the Django talks.

After a quick check in and some nice swag (Thanks OSCON!) I've just sat down in my first session of 2 for the day. The first session on my docket for my 2 session day was HTML5 & CSS3: The Good Enough Parts by Estelle Weyl.

I gotta give Estelle some credit, this topic (for most web developers) are over played out and slammed down our throats every second. This means that walking in i knew 70% of the HTML5 and CSS3 stuff, but her session wasn't built to just tell me what was coming, it was also to show which is where the winning began.

Her slides were interactive demos of almost all of the properties and her snow effect created fully by css was super rad. Although some of the javascript stuff suffered the fate of a dead server, the content was still very well explained. Props to making something boring as heck to interesting and for all the one off tips she gave during the presentation.

Up next was a session i was really looking forward to, Advanced Python. I'm not way advanced but given it was presented by a core developer, I was really looking forward to what I would learn.

Holy crap I learned a lot! Everything from bound methods to how the hell unicode and encoding works and why it's not as hard as we all think it is. The number one lesson that took my breath away was that everything in python are dictionaries. Sure i knew that but you don't really KNOW that until he deletes the class abstraction and asks you to re-implement it. Even talking about it gets me going again!

The day was a grand success and very happy with the lessons I picked, Today is my day of Node.js (YES!) so it'll be super awesome as well I hope!