One Year in Evangelism

We are quickly approaching the end of 2015, and the end of my first year professionally as a developer evangelist. It has been quite the roller coaster, including everything you would expect from a startup: expanded responsibilities, fast pace, and even a successful exit. Looking back on the experience thus far, I have some notes that I want to share, and some advice for others following in this path.

Let me back up first... In 2014 I spoke at 22 events, a couple of those were...

Object Oriented JavaScript (Part the Second)

Welcome to part two in our series on object oriented JavaScript! In the previous post we introduced readers to the core principles of OOP and started discussing some of the core nature of objects and functions in JavaScript. We moved onto constructors, the new keyword, and different types of object members. In this issue we're going deeper into the prototype object to discuss prototypical inheritance and polymorphism. We may refer to some nomenclature and syntax from part one, so be...

Object Oriented JavaScript (Part the First)

Object oriented programming (OOP) is a concept eminently familiar to those of us that have coded in Java, C++, .NET, and other languages. So why the focus on OOP? One of our primary tasks as application developers is to model the real world through code. Consider the often used example of the "Employee" and "Manager" users in a system, object oriented programming allows us to represent these two real world entities by collections of code having data and actions...

Goodbye `var` - JS Variable Declarations in ES6

This entry was originally posted on the StrongBlog (by me). Nothing changed, just adding it to my personal site. :) That said, you should check out StrongLoop if you're interested in building APIs in Node!

Everyone in the JavaScript world is talking about ECMAScript 6 (ES6, a.k.a. ES 2015) and the big changes coming to objects (class, super(), etc), functions (default params, etc), and modules (import/export), but less attention is being given to variables and how they are...

Speaking and Mentoring

I am not an abnormally lucky person. Privileged, yes, but I don't recall getting many "breaks" in my life that were not earned in some way, either by me directly or by my own upbringing. A number of people have commented on not only my success in tech conferences, but generally on the fact that some people "are lucky to be presenting at so many conferences". I'm here to tell you that it isn't luck, these people (by and large) work hard to get where they are...