Some bitnotes of these times…

The JavaScript Jungle

As part of the Brighton Digital Festival, we organised two “hack nights” at our ‘Async’ JavaScript meetup group. Async is an open community of JavaScript enthusiasts, with sessions twice a month at The Skiff in Brighton.

The “JavaScript Jungle” was part art project, part educational, part community builder. We set up the jungle as an environment within a single web page, and devised a simple way for people to add a creature to the jungle, animate it and let it interact with the environment and with other creatures. And the results were fantastic:

• See the jungle!
• Read the write-up
• Grab the code

Sponsoring Full Frontal

We’re super proud to be sponsoring the Full Frontal JavaScript conference for the third year running.

Held at the historic Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton, the conference brings together some of the sharpest minds in web development for a day (and night) of insightful sessions.

If you’ll be there at the conference, do come and say hi.

International JavaScript Show n’ Tell

On 10th November 2011, the night before the Full Frontal conference, Async will be hosting an “International JavaScript Show n’ Tell”. It’s something of a cultural exchange, for us Brightonians and all our international cousins.

You can mark yourself as attending on Lanyrd, or add a comment to the Async blog post if you’d like to take a 5-minute speaking slot.

AlphaGov

I’ve been working with the inspirational team at AlphaGov (that should probably be “BetaGov” by now, but the name seems to have stuck). It’s the single-domain, future website for the Government of the United Kingdom, and it intends to greatly improve the experience for anyone who needs to interact with government services.

You know how, any time that you want to find the answer to some citizen-based question – like, “Am I eligible for XYZ?” or “What is the tax requirement for ABC?”, or anything else of that nature – then it can be quite a fragmented, convoluted experience. We produced a small JavaScript application to prototype a more intuitive solution to the problem.

The beta should be out in the next few months.

New tools for BrightWorks

We’ve rolled out some new features on BrightWorks, the task management app for volunteers that is powered by our open source engine, “Tasket”.

We’ve added a slew of admin features, and spruced up the icons. You can read more about the changes on the BrightWorks blog.

JSConf

Hooray! JSConf.eu in Berlin was fantastic yet again. We were there, soaking up its JavaScript-fuelled brilliance, learning amongst the many.

Dharmafly ♥ Node.js

We’ve been up to our eyeballs in edgy tech, working on an elegant Node.js back-end for an even more elegant HTML5 application. It’s all about real-time collaboration, baby…

More soon.

Tags: bitnotes, weeknotes