Wednesday, September 03, 2008

JavaScript for Linux Hackers

Two weekends ago (24 August), I gave a talk about JavaScript at the Indian GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai (ILUG-BOM) - A small gathering of Linux hackers from around the city. The talk was held at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBSCE), TIFR, Mumbai.

It was very weird having to explain JavaScript to kernel hackers and sysadmins. It entails a different approach - one where you have to assume that the audience knows a lot already, probably more than you in some respects. They are not one to get wowed by browser effects and visual fanciness. Also I know very little about Linux systems, so we had very little in common. It's very challenging preparing for such an audience.

I spoke about the language, it's history, it's expressiveness, the type system, variable casting, objects, marshaling objects, it's lambda nature, and several language constructs, especially functions. What I didn't cover was things like the DOM, inheritance patterns and constructor functions, but there has to be something for next time, right? ;)

I think it went pretty well. Well enough for them to invite me for another session where we could cover the left-out topics. I'm sorry - I would have put my slides on slideshare or something, but honestly, when I was running through my slideshow the day before the presentation, I nearly dozed off. So I decided that I'd just do the presentation without the slides - just me talking, and a JavaScript console on the screen.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey,
Sorry for being so late ... I finally managed to upload the pics.

http://flickr.com/photos/ghoseb/sets/72157607258678040/

BG

Rakesh Pai said...

Thanks for the pics, BG. Some of them are really good.

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