Boston Front End Web Developers Meetup, Round #1
The first Boston Front End Web Developers Meetup went off this past Wednesday (May 25th) according to plan with around 30 people showing up for the inaugural meeting - I gave a couple of talks, the first was a "State of Front End Development 2011" covering the current state of the craft and talked a bit about the aims of the group. The second one covered the basics of a Semantic HTML5 Chop with some extra details on Meta-data and the Semantic Web (I believe only a couple people nodded off during that one) Both presentations are embedded at the end of this post.
I asked people to fill out a survey with a few questions - the most important of which was what topics of interest for upcoming presentation might be - here's the responses:
Actual Data:
| Writing Semantic HTML, HTML5 101 | 20 | 69% | |
| HTML5 & Progressive Enhancement, Shiv & Fallback Options | 21 | 72% | |
| Using Grids, Fixed and Fluid | 17 | 59% | |
| SaSS, Haml, Less | 11 | 38% | |
| Coding for the Mobile Web - Media queries, jQuery Touch, Mobile CSS support, etc | 21 | 72% | |
| Javascript, Basic (language overview) | 15 | 52% | |
| Javascript, Advanced (closures, namespacing, ... ) | 14 | 48% | |
| jQuery, Basic (jQuery 101 - Selectors, Animation, Ajax) | 17 | 59% | |
| jQuery, Advanced (Promises, Templating, Data elements, new features | 18 | 62% | |
| Client side performance optimization (CDNs, minification, async loading, spriting, ... ) | 17 | 59% | |
| A/B Testing | 14 | 48% | |
| Analytics Options | 12 | 41% | |
| Facebook integration, OAuth, OpenGraph, Social Widgets | 18 | 62% | |
| Semantic Web, RDFa, Microdata | 11 | 38% |
What I thought was interesting was: one, the number of topics that had significant interest (no topic got under 38%) and two, the level of interest in learning more about mobile. It's pretty clear that there's a lot of interest in everything HTML5 related, and additionally both a serious need for mobile development and a lack of confidence in the best practices.
If you're in the Boston area, join us for the next Boston Front End Web Developers meetup, and if you're interested in presenting on a topic shoot me an email at pascal at this domain.