They are watching Iron Man 2 this time, but kept the Stir Trek name

This post is a little bit late but c’est la vie. I will be talking at Stir Trek today about all the new goodness baked into the latest release of jQuery, version 1.4. I’m taking a page from this very cool HTML5 Presentation and have decided to skip the normal PowerPoint and do the whole presentation in HTML5. It was actually quite easy to do and since I’m showing off jQuery I can have live demos in my slides, so no fumbling between PowerPoint and a browser. I used the HTML5 Presentation as a template so you will notice that the look very similar, I’ve kept their stylesheet and their slide javascript. The presentation is functional in most modern browsers but is definitely fine tuned for Google’s Chrome browser.

My presentation tries to be a quick redux of the information found at the jQuery 1.4 Launch Site, specifically the great introductory series jQuery 1.4 Hawtness by the very talented Paul Irish. I took the javascript code examples from the jQuery 1.4 Hawtness videos and built functioning demos around them to better illustrate how they work to an audience.

Keeping in the spirit of my open-source free-love hippie nature, the presentation is completely free for anyone to use. You can find the full source of it on github, feel free to download it or fork it and make it better. Well I’m going to go run through the things I plan on saying for the next couple of hours, so pardon the brief post. It’s been an interesting time in my life recently and once everything settles down I’ll have some big news for everyone, so stay posted.

Edit: Realized that I can host whatever I want on my domain so instead of just linking to the source code on github I can actually host the presentation on this server. If you want to check it out go to http://ihumanable.com/jquery/presentation.html, remember it works best in Chrome but should work ok in other modern browsers, for IE users you will have to load up Chrome Frame.

sitting... check. staring... check. boredom... check. Looks like we've got ourselves a good old fashioned road trip!

I have a road trip coming up, one of those magical adventures where you sit quietly staring at the vast cornfields of the rust belt trying to keep from falling asleep and crashing into a cow or something. I’ve been preparing for this road trip and decided that instead of trying to find 5 hours worth of music to listen to that I could multitask and read while driving!

No I’m not some sort of superhero that can both read a book and drive, I am of course talking about audiobooks. Being a nerd I already have some audiobooks, I have Jon Stewart’s America and Steven Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!) but I thought that I could get some sweet programming knowledge in my brain while on the road. And so I have set out to find the best programming audiobooks / podcasts around, and I need your help!

So here is the challenge, if you so choose to accept it. Help me assemble a sweet list of programming audiobooks / podcasts, then I will subject them to my brain for 10 hours and come back and write a review of the good, bad, and ugly. Together we can produce the go to list for programmer road trip aural stimulation. Leave a comment with any audiobook / podcast related to programming, software development, or any other sufficiently nerdy subject. Let the miracle of crowdsourcing begin!!!

cupcake dispensing button

I have been working on prosper for the last few months, I started thinking about it in early October and according to GitHub my first commit was October 22nd. This project has been great fun so far and I’m not even close to a 1.0 release yet (right now prosper is at 0.6 well on its way to 0.7). I have learned a ton on this project that I would have never guessed before I started.

• The joy of GitHub
• The terror of phpDoc
• The prodding of friends
• The camaraderie of other developers (Will Bond and Jeremiah Peschka)
• The vulnerability of releasing the project
• The drive to keep improving

I completely underestimated the amount of work prosper would be, and I don’t mean coding (although coding has eaten up a large chunk of the time I normally fill with playing Borderlands). I didn’t realize the amount of work it takes to manage even a small project like this. GitHub has been an amazing resource, but at the end of the day it is a tool, and you need to spend time learning how to use it and populating it with data. Writing up documentation, reading documentation, creating examples, running tests, working with collaborators, discussing technical problems, it has been a mountain of unexpected stuff. Now I’m not complaining, this was the challenge I wanted, I’m learning a ton of new stuff, making great new connections, and pushing myself in ways I never have before. One of the most important new hats I’m learning to wear is promoter

Let’s say you have a great idea (like a standardized php database abstraction layer), and you decide to invest your time and energy into it. Great, you start coding like a madman and you have something working, you are working out the kinks, enjoying it, really making something worthwhile. After a while you have this project to the point where you think others might be able to use it, what do you do?

1. It’s too much work to do anything, just let the bits sit on your harddrive
2. I need to share this with people, I’ll toss it on GitHub / BitBucket / SourceForge / etc
3. I want to promote it
4. I’m going to get others involved

Those are the steps that I went through, and I would imagine a lot of people do, really I’m at step 2.5-ish, I created some pages within WordPress for prosper, but I plan on spinning out a standalone website for prosper at some point. The list looks easy but the problem is that you have to push yourself, because each step is costly.

To go from step 1 to step 2 you need to push past that voice in your head telling you to apply more polish. You need to push past any indecision or fear of criticism and get your code out there. The next step is to promote the crap out of your project. This step is difficult because how do you even go about it. Here are some ideas.

• Create a sample application using your project
• Give your project a home and shamelessly link to it
• Promote on reddit, Hacker News, etc.
• Get friends more famous than you to push it, if you don’t have famous friends, start sending out emails, the people that I’ve talked to have been really great
• Submit your project for review in any pertinent technical website (like PHP5 Magazine, which may actually be defunct)

For step 3 you have to push others, push friends, and push yourself to get your project on people’s radar. Now for the next step, getting others involved. You should have created some connections and hopefully some users, enlist them to make your project the best it can be. User’s can submit bugs, feature requests, and patches. Other developers can polish up bits they are interested in, as my good friend Jeremiah did. Getting more eyes and ears and noses in your project let’s you refine and build, spreading complexity around.

The point of everything is that you have to push. Even great ideas, great code, great projects can fall to the wayside if no one pushes. Promoting the work you do is nearly as important as the work itself, if no one ever uses your code, no one will care about the months of effort you put into making it beautiful. Get out there and be passionate, genuine, and don’t stop pushing.

Tomorrow I will be picking up the gauntlet that Jeremiah Peschka threw down today in What is Your Biggest Weakness? Tune in tomorrow to see what my biggest weakness is, and see who I challenge next.