Yesterday I had to opportunity to present at Drupalcon Boston 2008. It was a great experience to be able to mingle with the Drupal folks, hear their concerns, and see what kind of challenges they’re facing in everyday development.
Overwhelmingly Drupal users are not of the JavaScript persuasion and jQuery was a breath of fresh air in their development cycle. Users who had, literally, no JavaScript experience were able to produce interactions with little effort – which is precisely what jQuery is designed for.
There were already two introductory jQuery presentations at the conference so I decided to present on the state of jQuery and some of the advances that we’ve been making (especially in the way of plugin development and jQuery UI). My presentation is as follows:
Possibly my favorite experience was seeing Dmitri Gaskin present on jQuery and JavaScript. He’s a 12 year old programming prodigy – a module contributor to Durpal and a frequent presenter. I loved watching him deftly explain how JavaScript Object Prototypes work to a room of people 3x his senior.
I had the opportunity to clarify a minor point for someone asking a question during his presentation, which made for a great photo:
I think the experience is summed up nicely by a comment on the Flickr page:
The 12 year old in the front is teaching the 30 yr olds in the room how to use the programming tool created by the guy in the flannel.
I think it’s such an exciting time in which there can be a 900 person conference dedicated to a single piece of open source software. Drupal is a fantastic piece of work and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow and flourish.
Borgar (March 7, 2008 at 4:56 am)
That is one nice t-shirt! :-)
John Resig (March 7, 2008 at 5:06 am)
@Borgar: I love it, it’s one of my favorites. It’s actually a Threadless shirt and you can pick it up here.
Miksago (March 7, 2008 at 6:00 am)
Woah.
I mean, he told me he was twelve back in September last, when I was working on my UI plugin.. Can’t say I really believed him totally. That kid is either not afraid of making speeches, or the next public speaker of the century..
I couldn’t do that in a million years (matter of fact, I had a hard time controlling a YR9 Art Class while talking to them about Gimp.)
jake (March 7, 2008 at 9:23 am)
New jQuery logo?
Dan G. Switzer, II (March 7, 2008 at 9:28 am)
I just want to know what song John’s singing in the first picture. It looks like he might be trying his vocal chops are Opera. :)
Scott M. (March 7, 2008 at 9:47 am)
Really liking that logo + logotype!
Scott Trudeau (March 7, 2008 at 10:57 am)
John — thanks for helping to bring back the flannel! One of my favorite fashion trends of recent history.
John Resig (March 7, 2008 at 11:43 am)
@jake and Scott: Definitely expect to see more soon! :-)
@Dan: “Ode to jQuery,” I assume.
@Scott: Haha, no problem.
Oliver Kühn (March 7, 2008 at 2:07 pm)
Wow, that’s impressive – in the age of twelve i’am only play some games and fiddle some basic snipples together…
nice to see that other programmers like flannel, some of my teammates call me lumberjack ;)
Hamish M (March 7, 2008 at 3:10 pm)
Good stuff. It’s nice to see a younger generation getting into the awesomeness of web development.
DaveG (March 11, 2008 at 11:57 am)
Anyone have a video of Gaskin’s presentation?
Seungjin Kim (April 21, 2008 at 5:54 pm)
Hi John.. been learning jQuery, love it!
I’m just curious.. I think you look really young.
I’m assuming you’re a prodigy yourself.
Just how old were you when you made jQuery?