The idea has been tossed around for months. Holidays sort of got in the way, as well as life and various excuses. Well, no more excuses. We’re making a trek to our sister city to visit a Vegas Jelly meetup. If you’re interested in going, let us know. Step 1 will be getting a proper date in place. We’re thinking late April or early May. Jellys are on Thursday nights, so we will be most likely leaving on a Thursday morning. A van rental is a strong candidate for transportation. A bunch developers in a van together for 5 hours… mmmmmm I can smell it already.

Tenative dates, if you’re interested, let us know what works for you:
April 26th
May 1st
May 8th

The length of the stay depends on personal budgets and alloted time. We’re really excited about the trip. Let’s make it happen.

Now you know where to eat, but now you’re thirsty.

Another tweet came in asking about drinking in AZ, specifically beer. Then a couple more came over. So here’s another list. Again, if anyone has suggestions, leave a comment, submit a pull request, or msg me. I will get it added. Let’s get started with the drinkys.

It started with this tweet. I quickly replied with one of my favorite BBQ places in the Phx Area, Joe’s BBQ. I realized, after I posted, that Joe’s is going to be SUPER far from the conference. So I rattled off a couple other great spots closer to where @wesbos was going to be staying that day. And with that, this list is born. These are places that friends and I have been to and think are tasty. If you want to add a place, feel free to send a pull request on GitHub, or just send @tonyjcamp a msg on twitter.

Here’s a short recap from last nights (3/22/12) meeting:

CSS JS DOM in BFE

Oh hai.

It’s been a while since we’ve had out last meetup but we’re back in full gear. The holiday break was nice and allowed us to plan some big things.

First you’ll notice a new venue. Unicon has been nice enough to allow us to use their space for the evening. We want to start rotating where the meeting is held each month. So if you have a spot for us, let us know. We would love to have TagSoup at your place.

If you plan on coming, please head over to out MeetUp page and RSVP (it helps us order the right amount of food). Unicon, located in Gilbert, might be a bit of a drive for you. It will be worth it. Here’s why:

Rick Waldron (@rwaldron) is going talk about surprises. And how to present a surprise to a group of developers. (all this means is I asked Rick to have fun and talk about whatever he wants). Rick currently works at Bocoup as a JavaScript Punk Rocker.

Divya Manian (@divya). Divya points and laughs. She gossips about CSS & HTML. Divya currently works at Opera as a Web Opener. She will be crafting words, from her mouth that shall intrigue and captive the youth. (again, when she asked what she should talk about, I just said, have fun and do whatever you want.)

Ryan Gasparini (@rxgx) and Tony Camp (@tonyjcamp) are going talk about pseudo friends, pseudo elements, pseudo fun? (Depending on time)

Day 20 of the 30 Day Writing Challenge

TXJS 2011 A1 - Douglas Crockford - JavaScript Programming Style and Your Brain from pixilated ideas on Vimeo.

Day 19 of the 30 Day Writing Challenge

I can’t think of anything more uniformly despised by everyone in my career than process. Just mentioning the word generally causes a visible reaction. That isn’t a good thing. A good process should be your best friend that makes everything else in your life easier. I know why everyone reacts that way. We’ve all worked somewhere with a rigid process whose endless meetings and documents detract more than they add. That doesn’t mean process itself is bad, just that those processes are.

A process doesn’t have to be rigid. It doesn’t even have to cover development lifecycle if you don’t want it to. If you notice a recurring problem, implement a rule to solve it. Say, for example, you are regularly deploying sites and the links don’t function properly. This is clearly a problem, and bad for you. Now we identify what caused that problem. In this example it was the page was never tested in IE7, and some of the fancy modern code doesn’t work there. How was that missed? We never identified what browsers the client expected the site to function properly in. So we now have the rule, “Identify all required support configurations from client prior to the start of development.” Congratulations, you have a process. It’s that simple. There is no one process that will solve every organization’s problems. Every company is going to have to tailor their own process.

Day 18 of the 30 Day Writing Challenge!

Hey everyone, it’s me again. I’m sober this time, don’t worry. Well actually I’m drunk on a crazy idea that I had last weekend. I’ve always been really into the NCAA Tournament. I once took up an entire wall in my kitchen with a giant bracket just so I could fill it in after every game. So rolling around in my head last weekend was an idea of combining the NCAA Tournament with my other love, code. I started to play around with a format to see how small (in terms of character length) I could make all my picks. This is what I came up with.

Day 17 of the 30 Day Writing Challenge

Developers of all types know that they have responsibilities: to clients, to employers, to code standards, and so on. We’d be doing ourselves a disservice, however, if we didn’t acknowledge our responsibility to grow into not-typically-dev roles. It goes without saying that if you fall too far in love with a particular language and don’t learn alternatives/future-friendly sibling languages, you’ll become as certainly obsolete as your beloved language one day will.

This isn’t about learning new languages - this is about learning new disciplines. And wearing more hats.

Lots of hats. Party hats.

There is probably a spectrum that runs from Designer to to Database Engineer with developers front-end and back in between. Throw in copywriters, project managers, and account executives, and you have a whole world of hats to wear. You might think some of these roles are boring, and they might say the same of you, but that’s not the point - branching into other roles makes one immune to ignorance about them. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll learn a little about what you really love to do with your career.

Day 16 of the 30 Day Writing Challenge

This is one of my favorite presentations. GitHub just “gets it”. I wish this was a prerequisite for anyone wanting to start their own business.