overstimulate

back in KY again (sick as a dog)

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 coworking flock rails shdh comments
After spending another week in lovely San Francisco (thanks again to Kragen and B. for everything!), I am back in Kentucky. Unfortunately I got sick somewhere on the way back; as a result I feel horrible. While I was there, I had a blast:
  • Rohit had a get together where I met several new folks. In particular I got to talk with T.V. Raman, who recently joined google. He had several good ideas for improving web accessibility using greasemonkey. As always, the food and conversation were great.
  • Went to Super Happy Dev House. Alex demoed dojo, another sweet javascript library. Dylan demoed Renkoo, which besides being a useful app also happens to be based on some pretty neat technology. David Weekly was an awesome host (recent projects including PeanutButterWiki). personalbee, an rss aggregate with a twist, which is much cooler than it sounds. Cris showed some inspiring work related to fast prototyping of ajax sites. Met Brad Neuberg, whose first article for O'Reilly is about to be published, and is doing a cool thing called coworking (for those who do the independent thing and don't want to fall into social non-existence.) There were about 70 geeks there who all should be mentioned; you couldn't walk 5 feet without running into interestingness (or being drawn on by Eris)
  • Met up with the flock guys at several events. The open beta (coming soon) will be awesome. I got the app.id from them as current mozilla branches are pulling that from the build instead of including it as an option in about:config. I can confirm that many of extensions (including my Book Burro) work like a charm once you change the install.rdf. It will be interesting to see what power having Lucene (and perhaps embedded SQL in mozilla soon) will allow extension developers, including userscripts developers.
  • Rode with Rohit, Tantek, Lloyd and Chris to Flickr Fiesta. Ran into Simon Willison who just started at Yahoo working with the Flickr group (literally, he flew into SF earlier that day.) Afterwards many of us had Korean BBQ, where I got to meet more people than I could list.

I didn't run into Rabble (works for Odeo and is an early adopter of rails.) Perhaps next time I'll run into him.

If you are an expert at javascript (and other web technologies) and looking for a job, you should head to the Bay area asap. Do it. Some awesome companies need you and are making very tempting offers (don't just check out Google & Yahoo... they are sucking everyone in and leaving small startups needing help)

And if you aren't an expert in javascript, I recommend learning both dojo and prototype. Both are very useful and have their strengths. I think we will see some healthy competition from the two as time goes forward - and not to start a flame war either way I'll leave it at that.

This doesn't include the awesome work I started with Commerce.net. You'll have to wait until what we are doing is more complete before I can share. . .


Responses to "back in KY again (sick as a dog)"

  1. Thu, 22 Sep 2005 Chris Messina says:
    Great meeting you f2f. Really digging your work and looking forward to seeing Rhyzomatic happen! Let's keep plugging on that -- and get yo' ass back out here!
  2. Fri, 23 Sep 2005 Brad Neuberg says:
    Jesse, it was good to meet you out here! Feel free to drop me a line the next time you head out to the Bay Area, and keep me informed on the work you are doing with Commerce.net
  3. Wed, 28 Sep 2005 Lloyd D Budd says:
    It is Lloyd, not Llyod or Lolyd ;-) Awesome meeting you! Looking forward to collaberating in the future. Come work for us ~_^ Now, update your pic as it does not look like you!

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Jesse Andrews
open source, web browsers, web services, web sites & folk dancing. contacts/sites

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