October 29, 2009

YUICONF 2009 Impressions

I'm afraid to say that the organizers of the first annual YUICONF are at risk of being sued for negligence. Had they been more responsible, they'd have warned attendees to bring helmets in order to keep their minds from being blown. Two presentations in particular that melted my brain from their sheer bodacity were Luke Smith's "Events Evolved" and Satyen Desai's "A Widget Walkthrough." Now, don't get me wrong, the entire day was packed with great presenters covering really interesting topics. Though because the conference was split into two tracks, I couldn't attend everything. But all is not lost, since everything was recorded and will find its way to the YUI Theater very soon, I'm sure.

My "I should have brought my helmet" moment started when Luke walked us through YUI 3's new events architecture. I have to be honest with you, when he got to the part about custom event bubbling, I think I felt my frontal lobe explode. Not only does YUI 3 normalize and simplify event handling like nothing I've ever seen before, but it takes it to a whole other level by allowing developers to do things that up until now were simply impossible for mere mortals to do.

Then came Satyen, with his presentation on YUI 3's widget architecture. With YUI 3, you can focus on building widgets without having to code and recode all the plumbing that a well-written widget needs for things like state and attribute management. Instead, you simply make use of whatever you need from the new component infrastructure and you're on your way to building widgets that should require a "Caution: this may blow your mind" warning label.

And it would be a crime to leave out the big announcement of the day -- the release of the new YUI 3 Gallery. The gallery, which was put together by Dav Glass, will allow you to extend YUI 3 by "adding modules that are accessible from any YUI 3 use() statement." And if that weren't enough, code that makes it into the Gallery will be hosted on Yahoo's CDN. Yes, you heard me correctly, and yes, that was a popping sound that came from your brain.

The conference also included awesome presentations by Matt Sweeney, Matt Snider of Mint.com, Jon LeBlanc, Tripp Bridges & Allen Rabinovich, Todd Kloots, and Reid Burke.

Finally, Brendan Eich delivered the closing keynote and unintentionally proved once more how smart he truly is. I'd tell you more, but I don't want to cause you any permanent brain damage. Just keep an eye on the YUI Theater, and remember your helmet. I'll be wearing mine for day 2 of the conference.

Ara Pehlivanian
Front-End Engineer

Posted at October 29, 2009 8:28 AM | Permalink

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