Last night was event for the meetup "JS Sharefest". Here's the link to the event: http://www.meetup.com/hudson-county-javascript-meetup/events/228176942/
A Bar is a Nice Meetup Spot.
I've been to other meetup events that had taken place at offices in manhattan, but this one seemed much more personal and social. First of all, it was a Zeppelin Hall Bier Garden, which was a very different atmosphere from the stuffy office, and they had big 1 Liter mugs of beer which is always nice. My one gripe was that it was hard to find the group. I knew the organizer's face so when I so him I went up and asked if it was the Javascript group, but a small sign or something would be nice for first-timers who feel lost as I did when I first walked in.
The bar had actually two different public wi-fi networks, but for some reason I could not connect to either one. That's pretty depressing because I couldn't show or look at any work on, for example, github. If you are going to have a Javascript meetup (or just a computers meetup in general) it would be nice to do it at a place with internet connection.
We Love Computers. We Love Internet.
Tips I Learned
Here are some things I learned while I was at the meetup. There are a lot more tips that were thrown, but these are the things that really stuck with me the next day.
- Phaser is a great html5 game framework. I was talking to a very cool guy, Craig, and he really inspired me to put more time into building things with Phaser. I also made some connections that could lead to future collab projects or a game jam team.
- Check out Flexbox - The organizer, Carlos, swore by Flex box. I am not exactly sure what it is, but it is somehow meant to make you life easier when designing the responsiveness of a webpage.
- Visual Studio Code for Mac Typescript - On my windows tower I like to use Typescript in Visual Studio. Although to be honest I hadn't looked that hard, I wasn't really sure how I could program in Typescript on my macbook pro. One of the members showed me his workflow and setup, which included Visual Studio Code, and I'm planning to download that on my Apple poopintosh.
- Check out Ionic - There are plenty of tutorials and hype about making mobile apps (or mobile-optimized browser apps) with html, css, and javascript. Ionic is a "front-end javascript ui framework" that's meant for mobile. A member at the event showed me his little app, and honestly it looked really cool so I'd like to play around with this framework as well.
Get Out There!
The main thing is that I got myself out of my house, drove 2 hours up to Jersey City, and went to the meetup. Going to events like this can really expand your mind, expose you to different technologies, enlighten you to the practices of established companies, and allow you to make connections with people who share an interest in the same type of coding as you. I'll definitely be going to more Javascript meetups, and you should to!
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