zahnster

Today marks the first day of the Ajax Experience in Boston, MA. I was lucky enough to be able to join up as a volunteer and get in for free (I had come up to Boston for jQuery camp and they were searching out AJE volunteers).

The conference kicked off this morning, and it’s been an interesting experience so far. I’ve been assigned to the Breakout 1 room, which this morning hosted the Prototype presenters, Christophe Porteneuve and Andrew Dupont. They were part of this morning’s “developer day” events, where the leaders of some of the main JavaScript libraries (Prototype, jQuery, and Dojo) had 5 hour sessions (side by side) where they introduced their library and explained how you can get the most out of them and contribute to the community.

The ‘hotness’ of jQuery was more prominent than ever this morning, as our room was very very sparsely filled, while the jQuery room, which was the same size, was packed to the brim.

The imbalance of the turnout was clearly noticed by the Prototype speakers, and this brought about some discussion on the differences between the libraries, and the cases for using each. Now, these guys are obviously biased towards Prototype, but what they mentioned was pretty accurate. Basically, they proposed that jQuery is better for simpler web applications, while Prototype is still more robust for creating custom classes and prototypes, and creating your own sub-library. I completely agree with this, as we use Prototype at Zenbe for our very complex, intricate js needs, and the library makes it completely easy and fun to write complex classes.

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Last week I finally caved and bought a bigger hard drive for my laptop. I opted for the top of the line, 320 gigabyte Western Digital drive – at $109, I couldn’t refuse (it’s amazing how cheap these things are nowadays). Instead of doing the classic mac os migration, I decided that a fresh start with a clean os install would be the best avenue. It would allow me to really optimize my computer, utilizing all I’ve learned in the last year about optimizing a development environment.

I figured I’d document the apps, libraries, and utilities that I install, partly for self-reference, and hopefully for informing others of some of the essentials for professional web development (on a mac). I aim to be very specific about what I install, and oddly minimalistic considering all the space I’ve gained.

So, lets start with the main apps. There are a few must-haves, including the super powerful text-editor TextMate, s/ftp dream Transmit, hacker must-have Quicksilver, and who could forget the only svn gui worth mentioning, Versions. Last but not least, the essential web browser, Firefox and it’s various plugins (such as Firebug and the web developer toolbar). On the big expensive software side, it’s never a bad idea to have Adobe CS3 at your side.

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Technically, I am writing this post in response to the Golden Ticket competition being run by Carsonified. The theme of the competition is quite simple: create a blog post mentioning your desire to win the contest, link to it, and gather up 25 comments. The prize is a ticket to all Carsonified events in 2009 (these are the guys who run FOWD, FOWA, and such conferences), backstage passes, airline and hotel to 1 event, and an invite to a VIP speaker dinner, which is all very bad-ass.

Just recently have I come to understand the full benefit of professional networking. Although I frequently have desired to go to conferences, in actuality I have only been able to go to one – Refresh 06, and that was only because it was a local event. I nearly made it to FOWD last year, but got horribly sick the morning of and was never able to make it out.

Since then, and quite recently actually, I have started to get back into the professional networking vibe. Thanks to people like Charlie O’Donnell, who runs NextNY, I have started to see the real benefits of professional networking. Just tonight I went to a NextNY ShakeShack event, and it was a lot more productive and fun than I had imagined. I’m sitting here now with a bunch of awesome business cards, all from smart, talented people in the industry. We shot ideas, talked technical, and a grand time was had by all.

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