Day: June 7, 2011

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

Why a JavaScript hater thinks Everyone needs to learn JavaScript

Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year http://tinyurl.com/3kblbtf

Since HTML5 is the combination of a few new html tags (predominantly the audio, video and canvas tags) with JavaScript for the interaction, JavaScript is very important to the future of the web, web applications and a browser-based world.

What makes a language useful is some combination of the language’s expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we’ve seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I’ll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there’s one language you need to learn in the next year, it’s JavaScript.

If this is your beat, the article is well worth reading.  If you’re not that technical, keep in mind that HTML5 is largely about JavaScript, which is getting faster and more flexible all the time!

Categories
Business & Marketing Career

Why (and How) we need to reinvent ourselves regularly?

Last Saturday, June 4th, I had the pleasure of sharing a Keynote with Marcelo Lewin at the OC Pro Media Camp.  The topic was re-inventing ourselves.  This blog post is the essence of what I said in that keynote.

How do we embrace change? Wholeheartedly and with gusto.  Change is inevitable. In fact it may be the only true constant.  Most people dislike or even fear change, but want things to “get better”.

Fundamentally there are two types of change: Continued Reinvention & Dramatic Reinvention.  I’m 55 now and, as best I can count, I’m on my sixth distinct career. Many of those were a slow transition: from being a general, do anything video production company to specializing in training and education production, which lead inevitably to becoming a training design specialist. The transition from Charisma Video Productions – my first Australian company – to Charisma Digital as the first digital post house in Australia’s sixth largest market – was a significant transition, but more evolution than revolution. But the jump from the Intelligent Assistant training tools to Digital Production BuZZ was a complete re-invent.

Continue reading “Why (and How) we need to reinvent ourselves regularly?”