Meetups, JS, Robots

I just got back from another SydJS (@sydjs) which was f*ckin' awesome! I really love the JS community here in Sydney (and around the globe, really). There's something about the shared experience of Javascript that makes it really easy to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger and talk like you've been friends forever. The past few days has given me ample opportunity to experience this.

It started with JSConfAU last Thursday which is really good. I got to talk to a bunch of these "strangers" throughout the day, including some of the people I usually only get exposed to on Twitter. So that was really fun! When I go to events like this, I feel like everyone is doing their best to help everyone else succeed. The love is awesome.

The speeches were great too. When Brendan Eich talked about ES6, most of it was already available on the Internet. But it was still good hearing it all in one place in a well-organized form, and coming from a trustworthy source. He mentioned that in ES6, you might be able to override operators based on the types of its operands.

I also loved Isaacs talk about Streams in Node. Not because I particularly care about Streams in Node (they're cool, but I don't use them directly enough for it to matter), but because it was a great lesson in API design and in the value of a good API. Node contributors went through a great deal of effort to ensure backwards compatibility, which still giving a much better API in newer versions. It inspired me and I hope to offer the same stability to users of my APIs in Stash.

Then tonight's SydJS was awesome as well. Felix Geisendörfer spoke from Berlin about Nodecopter and the hassles he went through trying to control my AR Drone from 10,000 miles away. It was a really good presentation, despite a bit of flaking out on my part with audio, and the Skype call cutting out every so often. I'm so glad I bought that drone, and I'm really looking forward to playing around with it more, and getting some Node on there.

Then Dan Friedman from Ninja Blocks came on and did a similar talk to the one he did for JSConfAUwhere he live-coded some devices in Node to react to external changes (broken builds or twitter feeds). But this time went full-on and showed us how anything could be programmed to act like a block - he put some code in a browser window, and suddenly that browser was acting like a Ninja Block. It was pretty awesome, even after seeing it once already.

So after all that I really want to program some robots. I have an AR Drone, a Ninja Block, and a need to use some duplex streams. Anybody have an idea?