dojo.beer(3) wrap up

Oh man, this were amazing 2 days here at Skytec. After the the Uxebu and Sitepen taught the ins and outs of Dojo in a very successful workshop on Friday, we went on for the third dojo.beer() on Saturday.

While technically the workshop wasn’t part of dojo.beer() it felt like one event to me. Maybe we should think about always including a workshop/tutorial-day as part of dojo.beer(), i.e. one tutorial-like day and then an unconference-like setting on the second day. Hey, I can drink beer on two days in a row!

Pete Higgins showed his awesome skills at the end of the first day, when he did an improvised version of his patterns talk. While the crowd learned some solid basics just before, they were introduced to what can be done with Dojo if you dive in further. I guess most of them went home both satisfied with what they just had learned and the strong urge to do more.

On the second day, which was the actual dojo.beer(3) unconference, Dylan Schiemann gave an intro to the Dojo Project, the Foundation and how to contribute. Sam Foster showed us a little unit testing with Rhino (I wonder when I can have SquirrelFish or TraceMonkey as standalone development environments. The building blocks are there, I guess). Wolfram Kriesing showed EventList, a pretty crazy google-calendar-yahoo-pipes-google-docs-mashup-turned-widget. That is thinking outside the box (model). Tobias Klipstein did a short intro to Dojango, a reusable app for my favorite environment: Django. I have to say I love this combination. I worked on a Django-Dojo-Webapp for the last year and it is an amazing experience. The work on Dojango will get you started in no time and it will give you some more helpers to get you Dojo-based site done more quickly. It’s in early stages but continually improving.

Nikolai Onken presented the documentation of Dojo and how to contribute. The Docs are pretty good, but it’s pretty hard to find your way around when you are new to Dojo. The docs will likely be the first place, where I put my newly signed CLA to good use. In between the sessions we shared some stories where we put Dojo to good use. It’s pretty exiting to see so many Dojo-based sites even without realizing it is Dojo behind the scenes. Luckily there is an extension for Firefox which tells you just that ;-)

Finally there was Pete again, who shamelessly plugd a mini app. Looks like dojo.conflict(), aka the $, is some dangerous stuff ;-)

(If you haven’t seen Pete giving a talk, you should drop everything on the next possible occasion. Somehow he reminded me of Hammy, the hyperactive squirrel from “Over the Hedge”. I guess, he could rewrite all of dojox within a day if you supply him with enough additional caffeine ;-) )

Thanks to everyone who helped making this happen at Skytec, esp. Wolfgang, Roberto, Florian and Manuela. I’d guess this was just the start for many more community events at Skytec AG. Besides Dojo, Django is on my radar as well.