Pusher at Falsy Values

Things have finally settled down after getting back from Falsy Values, a True JavaScript event, which was held in Warsaw, Poland. As the conference name indicates the event was 100% JavaScript focused with two days of workshops, a Pusher party and a conference.

The two days of workshops covered a number of really interesting topics including node.js, Desktop apps with JavaScript, ECMAScript 5, TDD/JavaScript testing and HTML5 Games Development. Just from the wide range of workshops it’s clear to see that the world of JavaScript continues to grow and it’s great to be a JavaScript developer right now.

HTML5 games are in their infancy but there is a real buzz about the topic and real-time online gaming is something we are obviously really interested in. So we decided this was the one for us. The workshop focused on common practices when building games in JavaScript and we used Canvas as our view onto the game world. Canvas will definitely have its place, and Peter van der Zee and porneL demonstrated that as we first built a Tetris game, then a Mario game and then combined them so Mario was jumping between falling Tetris blocks. Awesome! They also showed us a Syndicate-style game they built in 24 hours. We didn’t cover it in the workshop, but WebGL will also be massive in this space.

The conference day was jam-packed with some really great talks:

• Keynote by Douglas Crockford (see above image)
• Dmitry Soshnikov on ECMAScript 6, codename Harmony – slides
• Juriy “kangax” Zaytsev on Fabric.js, a Canvas library
• Tom Hughes-Croucher on node.js
• Zbigniew Braniecki of Mozilla on JavaScript engine JIT (just-in-time) compilation methods (method vs. tracing) and what we can do to help the compilers – slides
• Brian LeRoux building an app in PhoneGap
• Tantek