found drama

Last night was the third BurlingtonJS meet-up, and it seems to have been another success. Attendance was good and the crowd was once again pretty engaged. Always fun, always a room full of smart people, always good discussion. This month, I had the privilege of presenting, and took a few pages from chapters Michael Fogus’s (@fogus) new book, Functional JavaScript. ¹ I’ve included the slides for my talk here:

I’ve also posted the code associated with the talk (see slide 13) on Github for people to play with at home: github.com/founddrama/burlingtonjs-funjs-talk ^{2 3}

As an amusing aside: one of the attendees had just received his copy of Functional JavaScript in the mail that day and after my talk asked for me to autograph it for him. Which was funny, to say the least. So I happily obliged and signed on behalf of Mr. Fogus:

The evening’s other presenter was Garrett Allen (@g0urd) who gave a fantastic (and fun) talk on webscraping ⁴ — including the tools, the techniques, and some of the ethics around it. Quite a well-rounded talk, and a really good job for someone who claimed to be giving a public talk like that for the first time. Best part? Catering to the audience, and making it topical by having his… “put it all together” exercise involve webscraping Dealer.com sites to create a map of client locations. (Nice job, Garrett!)

It was another great night, and thanks again to Pete and Patrick. They’re always looking for sponsors and speakers so… Maybe next month it will be you? Follow @BTVJS on Twitter to find out what next month has in store!

1. Which, I might add, Functional JavaScript is (as I type these words) the #1 seller for Amazon’s computer books category.[↩]
2. Disclaimer-ish thingy: I found out after the fact that Mike pulled the term “protocols” from the final draft and switched it to “mixins”. Which makes total sense (and I think was some of the feedback that I gave him…) and/but it was so much more fun to talk about them as protocols so I left them that way rather than try to fix it up with minutes to spare…[↩]
3. And yes, I totally forgot to do a plug for the Vermont Functional Programming meet-up (@VTFun).[↩]
4. Write-up and slides, including sample code, are posted on his blog: garrettallen.com/2013/06/24/web-scraping-javascript.html[↩]

About Rob Friesel

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