BarCamp London 2

19 FEB

BarCamp London was, as expected, great. I definitely felt like a got more out of it than last time (and it was good before). There were some great sessions but for me it was all about the talking in the corridors. It was excellent to meet and speak to some of the microformats people who I’d not had chance to speak to before like Chris Messina and Brian Suda and learn more about that. I’m pretty new to the whole thing but have taken more of an interest in it since deciding to write Sumo. It was also good to meet Andy Mitchell who’s been working on the other JavaScript microformats parser with Michael Kaply. I did however make a bit of a tit of myself during the microformats panel by asking them stupid questions about XFN. Sorry about that, I’ll be more sensible next time. To the panel’s credit they managed to come up with an informative and interesting answer regardless.

Aside from the microformats stuff I was fully into all the JavaScript stuff as always. I think my Metaprogramming Javascript presentation went down fairly well as I only solicited blank stares of confusion in the final example but really that’s to be expected…it was rather nuts and I’m not a natural at explaining complex things so I usually need to work out an explanation beforehand.

What was best about it for me was the conversation afterwards. Matthew Somerville said that he used similar techniques to have methods that replace themselves with shortcuts depending on what properties the browser has available which is a really nice use of metaprogramming for optimisation. Lawrence also pointed out that the JavaScript aspects stuff was another good example of using metaprogramming techniques. I think there’s going to be some real mileage in getting all of this stuff together so over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing a larger article/paper covering the whole area in detail. I’d also like to rework my BarCamp presentation, which was very brief for such a large topic, into a full length presentation for something like The Ajax Experience. On that note, can anyone think of a good online home for this article on metaprogramming? The usuals like A List Apart, Sitepoint and Digital Web probably won’t want a full on technical article like this so I’m a little stumped.

Anyway, for now here are the BarCamp slides as a PDF. You can also look at the full code for the examples I referred to in my SVN repos: DOMBuilder, Sumo and Behavior classes from Low Pro.