LNUG meet-up January 2014

Tue Jan 21 2014 09:40:41 GMT+0000 (Greenwich Mean Time)

Yesterday I attended the London Node User Group's (LNUG for friends) meet-up. It was great to see some known faces, and lots of new ones. Maybe a third of the attendees were new, according to the relatively super unscientific method of raising their arms if that was their first meetup.

There were three short talks.

The first one by Alexandros Marinos was about resin.io, a WIP initiative to make working with physical devices in JavaScript as easy as "git push resin master". It was great to hear about their previous work on hacking custom Linux distributions and Chromium so that they could be used in those smart rubbish bins you might have seen around the City Of London.

Second talk was by Alex Roche on Arduino and NodeJS. Sadly this is a topic that has been discussed quite a lot already, so it didn't add much new information to what I already knew. Still I paid attention to the delivery--it was clear, efficient and to the point, which is something I appreciate.

The final talk was by Rowan Manning on UX for node modules. That is something that truly interests me! How do you make it easy for users and potential users of your node modules to know what's up in your software? How to use it at a glance? Or, as someone from the audience suggested, are you letting them know when your library is obsolete and they should use something else that is much better? There were many things I already do, and many I will probably incorporate too.

So that's for the talks. But before them I had been speaking to Francisco Jordano about some issues we had when debugging a Firefox OS app, and he showed me a one weird trick for the AppManager that solved my issue and makes everything easier. Megawin!

Then there was a funny thing too, and it's that apparently I tweeted with the #lnug hash quick enough to win a ticket for London JS conf. Woooohooo! So maybe see you there.

All in all it was a great event. Many thanks to Andrew Nesbitt (@teabass) for organising! I wish I can attend the next ones, but they happen on Wednesdays while I'm having a weekly meeting, so not possible (unless I clone myself). Yesterday's was a happy anomaly as it was on a Monday because of reasons. Yay reasons!