I attended "Dev Night" at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids last month, and it was inspiring and infomative. Take aways come in two flavors - Specific JS learnings; and how to connect to the GR tech community. This post captures both for my (and your) reference:
How to Connect with the GR Tech Community:
- Conga-wm.org offers a calendar of events in the GR area. Very cool!
- The Factory is starting a 12-week programming course, starting in January: http://TheFactory.com/colearning Note- as of today, this site is just a "Contact Us" link that opens a "Mailto"
Other Take-Aways
- J. Tower of Falafel Software gave a great talk about creating single page apps. Check out his blog at http://blog.falafel.com/jtower
- Javascript isn't going anywhere
- Stresses modularity (one of my favorite design principles)
- http://jsfiddle.net is a cool utility to see Javascript changes in real time
- Stresses use of JS libraries with demos of Angular.js and kendo
- demos us of a "Router" to bind with a DB real time.
- jtower@jtower.com
- JS Libraries Panel
- Praise for CoffeeScript
- Compiles into (good) javascript
- Praise for Karma (Testing tool for Angular.js)
- 4 of 4 use Angular (including the CoffeeScript proponents)
- Praise for Node.js for server side
