Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself. – Edmund Lee
This quote spoke volumes to me tonight. Tonight I attended the second “2 JerseyScript 2 Furious” meetup for JerseyScript: NJ-area Front-end Developer Posse, a meetup group in my area for web developers. I have learned that some of the people in the group, work on products or sites that I know of. The guy from the first presentation, Brian(@brianloveswords), was talking about the site nodeschool.io, he works on and how he organizes group learning sessions/classes about node.js in different locations around the world. Turned out, when I went to look it up on Google Chrome on my iPhone, I already had the website bookmarked. I then remembered, I bookmarked it sometime last year for future use, when I downloaded node.js onto my computer. When I finally get around to learning node, I now know whom to send help requests to via Twitter.
Another gentleman, Eric(@JerseySchorr), worked for NY Times as a front end web developer, but started out as a back end developer there. He’s responsible for everyone’s favorite crossword puzzle, coded in HTML5, on the site. He had the idea of making the crossword puzzle accessible on the browser without requiring the user to have to download an app. Definitely enjoyed his presentation a lot. Maybe because he showed a great use of <canvas> or it was the few lines of JavaScript he showed that I understood. A very important tip he shared, that I’m passing on: Don’t use CSS to re-size canvas. Very interesting. I might try my hand at the NY Times crossword puzzle tomorrow. No guarantees that I will successfully complete it.
The third presenter, Helen(@helenhousandi), worked for WordPress.org(@WordPress). Her twitter profile says “core committer at WordPress”. Helen mentioned a bit of the work she did on the admin. They make use of preprocessors, like Sass, to get their work done efficiently. I was glad to hear that, since a friend from college not only mentioned Sass to me, but gave me a copy of a book on it. I’ve looked up some info on Sass and it looks a wonderful tool, for web developers to have. I learned many lines of CSS went into WordPress. A very big number, that escapes me right now. Definitely pass 1,000, I think. If any of you developers whom work on WordPress see this post, you all are amazing. Our organizer, Jenn, mentioned WordPress was what got her started in web development. She recalled how she moved from Geocities to WordPress, and started customizing it to her wants & needs. That reminded me of my own path into web development. Long live Geocities!
The final presenter, John(@seejohnrun), whom turned out to be a fellow NJIT almuni, did two mini-presentations. The first showcased a pong game using your scroll bar as your paddle. I enjoy seeing HTML5 and JavaScript in action. The he shared a bit of a service his advertising company provides. I’m not going to go into further detail about it, since I’m not sure if the product has been released yet or is still in the prototype stage. I can say, it’s amazing what you can do with HTML, CSS, & JavaScript, once you have spent years learning it and working with it. Seeing the pong game he created, has me contemplating, trying my hand at making a tic-tac-toe game, that was recommended for me. It may take me longer, but it could be a great learning experience.
I was going to put this post under Web Dev initially, but then I decided not to, since it affected my outlook on my future. Viewing all the interesting things these individuals have worked on and are currently working on, had my attention riveted. I thought I would feel self-conscious, because my knowledge was not at their level. Instead, I was inspired. I want to not only be as skilled as they are, in the years to come, but to be able to share any knowledge that I may have, with others one day.