My latest Closure talks

Last Thursday, January 6, I had a doubleheader, as I gave one talk in the afternoon at an undergraduate MIT Web programming competition (6.470), and another talk in the evening at the Boston JavaScript Meetup. It was a long day (I took the train up from NYC that morning), but I got to talk to so many interesting people that I was far more energized at the end of the day than exhausted!

I cleaned up the slide decks from both talks so they are suitable for sharing. Because I was informed that the MIT programming competition had a lot of freshmen in it, I didn't go into as much detail about Closure as I normally would have because I didn't want to overwhelm them. (I ended up taking so much out of my "standard" talk that I ended up finishing ~30 minutes early, though that was likely a welcome relief to the students as I was the last speaker in a full day of lecture.) As you can see, the MIT talk is only 17 slides:



The talk I prepared for the Boston JS Meetup was the most technical one I have given to date. It was my first time presenting for a group that actually has "JavaScript" in the name, so it was refreshing not to have to spend the first 15 minutes explaining to the audience that JavaScript is a real language and that you can do serious things with it. By comparison, my second talk went much longer (about an hour and a half?), as there was a lot more material to cover as well as tons of great questions from the (very astute!) audience during my presentation:



The one thing that these presentations do not capture is the plovr demo that I have been giving during my talks. (This was also the first time that I demoed using plovr with jQuery, as I had just attempted using jQuery with plovr for the first time myself the night before. I have an open topic on the plovr discussion group about how to make plovr easier to use for jQuery developers, so please contribute if you have thoughts!) At some point, I'm planning to do a webcast with O'Reilly on Closure, so that might be a good opportunity to record a plovr demo that can be shared with everyone.

Want to learn more about Closure? Pick up a copy of my new book, Closure: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly), and learn how to build sophisticated web applications like Gmail and Google Maps!