Joe’s Blog

As you may have noticed, Joe’s Goals had a lot of down time over the last couple of days. I think it is cleared up though. Mostly it related the database and I had to archive some old data to make it work. If you are an active user your data should still be intact.

On, and by the way, I am working on Joe’s Goals 3.0 for a fall release. More details will be posted in the future.

JSConf 2009 in Alexandria VA was simply the best conference I’ve ever been to. Two days, April 24th and 25th, filled with amazing speakers, fantastic tech demos, great social events, good food, and tons of fun. The conference was crafted by Chris Williams and his wife Laura as a labor of love and the passion comes through in every detail.

There have been a number of great write ups already that cover the presentations and product announcements (I put together a quick link page with all things JSConf). I want to step back and look at the conference experience itself. Specifically the things that were done right that other conferences should learn from.

Here are my top 12 “bests” in no particular order:

1. SO Track - for wives and spouses Laura led two days of tours and adventures around D.C. that were paid for by the conference sponsors. Sounds like they had a lot of fun. SOs were also welcome at the after parties as well. Wish my wife could have made it.
2. Good cabling / Internet - a personal pride of Chris, most of the tables had power adapters underneath and four separate Internet lines with their own routers provided good Wifi throughout the conference. A must for all the twitters flying out of the room.
3. Un-Conference Track B - a separate room/projector was a available for anyone to grab, schedule a talk, and present. Attendance was always good for these talks and some of the most practical and useful demos happened here.
4. Not too big - at only 130 the conference had a “right size” feel to it. Many more than that and you couldn’t ask useful questions in the talks or socialize in the same manner. The numbers were small enough that you kept running into and chatting with the same people.
5. Sell out early - this is key. With the small numbers and a topic as hot as JavaScript the conference sold out early. Most of the attendees were passionate JavaScript developers who were themselves qualified to gives talks on various JavaScript topics. There were very few noobs so the conference could focus in on the “good parts” of JavaScript without worrying about loosing half the room to tough concepts.
6. After parties worth attending - early bird party Thursday night with parties on Friday (America Cafe with a view of the capital) and Saturday (Fly Lounge, underground airplane like club with Star Wars as the in flight movie). Some of my best technology conversations happened here.
7. Paper and Crayons - the tables all had sheets of paper and crayons inspiring art, jokes, and sudo code to be hung up on the walls.
8. Twitter - #JSConf was hot during each talk as play by play came over the wire. Instant feedback in a setting like this is amazing and a product of good wifi and great brain food.
9. Food and Snacks - thanks to some last minute sponsors the food was upgraded. No box lunches for us, the Hotel provided excellent catered food including deserts and snacks throughout the day.
10. Short presentations - with a target of 35 minutes + 5 minutes for questions, the presentations had to be focused, zippy, and informative. If they had been an 45 minutes or an hour we would have started loosing people.
11. Good web presence - The JSConf website is excellent as conference site’s go and really helped raise the bar of respectability for the conference. This really was a meeting of the JS Minds.

One final item that I’m hoping and praying will also be a “best” are the conference videos. Track A was filmed and post production has probably already started. Hopefully the whole community will get a chance to learn from this great conference over the next couple of months. Big shout out to everyone who attended and I look forward to seeing you at other events in the near future!

It isn’t often that Joe’s Goals gets a video review and this one was so random I felt I should pass it along. The video comes from Channel Flip, a British video entertainment site.

I’ve got a new project finally coming out of beta testing and I’m very excited to finally announce it. The project is called Most Recent and it lives at mostrecent.net.

Most Recent was born out of frustration with the quality and scope of popular social news/bookmark sites. For every good link you have to wade through handfuls of spam, link bait, fluff, or outdated content. Most Recent isn’t a social link site. Instead it empowers page editors to create unexpectedly delicious pages on any topic by amassing the newest, most relevant, and most useful content from across the Internet. I wanted to be able to go to a page and have experts in that field highlighting what is really important. And I wanted to be one of those experts in the areas I cared most about.

Most Recent features an experimental drag and drop editor that makes it easy for anyone to build a page, no coding skills required. Pages are located at mostrecent.net/your-page-name. Check out the video to see how it works.

While virtually any topic is fair game, I want to start by building a community around programming languages. Of course they are of interest to me, but they also move so fast they demand this type of resource. If you are passionate about a programing language please check it out. You can also see if your page location is still available here.

If you’re looking for some good examples, I’ve been working on the JavaScript and F# pages myself.

Check out Most Recent and try creating a page. I invite your feedback and hope that this proves useful to folks.

A new version of Joe’s Goals is now live with a number of minor bug fixes and improvements. Thanks to everyone who keep writing in suggestions and bug reports. I’ve got some exciting things coming down the pipe for the next few months so stay tuned.

What got fixed:

• The badge new refreshes after you make a change to your goal tracker
• A bug on the preference page that can’t you from making updates in certain browsers has been fixed.
• The width of goal names has been fixed in 2.0 so you can’t create goals with longer names than can be displayed.
• The reports have been fixed to solve the problem of certain negative goals showing up with positive scores.
• Made better distinction between the save and clear log buttons.

I’m going to be giving one of the presentations at JSConf2009. Scheduled for April 24th and 25th JSConf2009 is a conference for JavaScript developers and will be taking place just outside Washington DC. I’ll speaking on TaffyDB, a free JavaScript library I wrote that is at the heart of Joe’s Goals.

If you are a web or JavaScript developer I’d urge you to attend and support this upstart conference.

I’ve been working on this JavaScript News and Resources page and I’m looking for more content. The basic idea is to build out a one page reference to easily access the highest quality content related to JavaScript. I know there is a lot more out here so this is my call out to see what other’s may have found.

Spesificlly I’m looking for:

• Videos worth watching
• Good blogs that regularly cover JavaScript
• Ajax Frameworks/Libraries (preferable ones you have experience with)
• Non-Ajax Libraries (utilities, etc)
• Tutorials
• JavaScript on the service resources
• Other places to find news

Got something for me? Send it here.

Everyone loves a good resolution. They just hate working at it. It is easy to look at a mountain and see yourself standing on the peek…next year. It is harder when you reach the base and face that long, difficult, and boring hike. But the rewards are worth it. Follow these very simple and very practical tips to increase your chance of success.

1. Pick resolutions that are doable - Deliberately pick resolutions that are practical and that you can both implement on January 1st and make a part of your lifestyle throughout 2009.
2. Come up with a plan - You want to be more successful than the guy next door? Have a plan! Want to lose weight? Pick a specific number, chart it out on a piece of paper, see how much you have to lose each week to achieve your goal. Make a list of what you need to do to follow your plan. List potential hangups. Write it all up so it is easy to reference. Post it on your fridge, your desk, your mirror. Define what you need to do and do it.
3. Track your progress with Joe’s Goals - How often do you compromise? When do you trade off and break your resolutions? How successful have you been in keeping with your goals day in and day out? Our minds aren’t designed to keep that information, so you have to track, track, track. Use a tool like Joe’s Goals to keep track of what you are trying to do. Note your stumbles and your successes. It is the only way to know if you are making progress.
4. Talk it over with friends - A friend who is ignorant of the personal change you are adopting can be your worst enemy. They know the old you. They will tempt you and draw you away from the path of victory. But a friend who knows what you are trying to do, what you are up against, and how they can help will become a huge asset. Talk about your goals. Get buy in, support, and encouragement.
5. View your failures in perspective - No truly innovative and successful individual has success handed to them. They all have to earn it by discovering hundreds or thousands of approaches that don’t work. They fail. You’ll fail. View it through the lens of life: you are still alive, you still have your wits about you, you’ve gained skills, you’ve gained knowledge, you can do better next time. Most important of all: move on. Don’t have a pity party. Turn against your failure and guilt. Fight the good fight.

Best of luck to you in 2009!

Worthwhile comic for any goal setter to ponder. Often it isn’t a lack of time, talent, or inspiration that keeps us from meeting our goals. Our success may be determined by how well we say “No!” to the things keeping us from our goals.