polyhack / nodejsau Goto Github PK

I've been experimenting a lot lately with building modular HTML5 games using browserify: getting started earlier this year after being involved with the voxel.js project, and eventually taking a shot at my own small games and demos.

I thought it'd be good to share my experiences to help others get started, so on Monday night I gave a talk at Node Ninjas about some of the basics of game development and how to handle games in the browser.

The slides and a video are up online now - I've also started up a wiki for game modules which could be a good starting point if you're keen on experimenting yourself!

CampJS II 2013 was held last weekend on the Gold Coast. There was a strong Node theme, particularly hardware. CampJS III 2014 will be held somewhere near Melbourne, stay tuned for details.

The list of talks is being gathered here.

For me, Sebastian Porto's talk was one of the highlights. His Understanding JavaScript Prototypes presentation used __proto__ to teach how the prototype chain works. It builds on a post from earlier this year. A must-read although unfortunately we didn't get this one on video! If anyone asks me about JavaScript's (slightly messy) prototypal nature then I'll be pointing them to his post & slides.

Vim Tips by Odin Dutton and Jason Weathered was interesting for the Vim inclined and their summary contains a bunch of links and tips.

Anna Gerber kicked off the hardware theme with her JS for Physical Computing talk. It was continued by the Thoughtworks folks who lead some workshops and helped people build a really neat Raspberry Pi-based game.

Higher-Order Fun by Katie Miller brought some FP to JavaScript-land. Coming from a Haskell background she discussed functional programming across various languages and how we can take advantage of FP techniques in JavaScript.

Building Modular Games for the Web by Hugh Kennedy is an inspiring talk that should be able to encourage any listener to get hacking on HTML5 games! I'm looking forward to the video of this one being available.

Extreme Messaging for the Internet of Things by Mark Wolfe of Ninjablocks covered the MQTT messaging protocol in particular and had a general focus on messaging in the age of highly-connected micro-devices.

Learn You The Node.js For Much Win by me was both an intro-to-Node.js presentation and a self-driven terminal-based workshop; all aimed at the Node-n00b but a good challenge for experts alike.

There was more, but that's the content that's been published so far. We'll get videos up soon(ish).

Don't miss out on the next CampJS, speakers are already being lined up and a venue is being sought!

We are approaching to the next node.js meetup in Melbourne. 28th of August, Locomote office. Everyone is welcome from node novices to experts.

Talks:

• Camp.js highlights. (everyone from camp.js)
• "Learn you node.js" workshop demo by @sidorares)
• javascript generators and mysql-co library by @sidorares
• Introduction to TypeScript by @basarat
• testing NodeJS with Mocha, Should and alternatives by @mlilley
• TBA more soon

If you want to share your project/idea feel free to comment here or on meetup page. If there is something particular you want to learn about node.js - put it as a comment here as well, chances are someone able to explain this might read your comment.

Update 2014-02-06: See npm.nodejs.org.au for updated instructions on how to set up your npm client to pull from the Australian mirror.

Installing from npm is always a pain from this side of the planet, particularly when you have a lot of dependencies to install and particularly when you've experienced it from a computer located in North America.

For a little while now I've been maintaining a mirror of the npm registry running out of the AWS datacentre in Sydney and it's an absolute pleasure to be able to npm install and have it complete in a couple of seconds. I'm now confident enough to share it with anyone else who would like to be able to do quick installs.

All you need to do is put this line in your ~/.npmrc file:

registry = http://npm.nodejs.org.au:5984/registry/_design/app/_rewrite

You won't be able to publish to it, so you have switch back to the standard registry to do that. You either have to remove or comment out that line, or be a little more clever.

Thankfully, @deoxxa has already thought of this and has a great script that I can recommend: npmrc.

Simply make a ~/.npmrcs/ directory and put alternative .npmrc files in it with names indicating their use. For example, I have one named write that uses the global registry and one called read that uses npm.nodejs.org.au. When I want to switch between them I just type npmrc read or npmrc write and it switches a symlink from ~/.npmrc to the appropriate file in ~/.npmrcs/.

(If you're running your own mirror, please continue to replicate from the global registry, Joyent can afford the bandwidth more than me.)

Enjoy!

Accidentally let nodejs.org.au expire, ooops. But also this has got really stale and there's not that much interest so let's archive this.

(A summary from a presentation given at MelbNodeJS on the 28th of August 2013)

Takeaways from the TypeScript demo

You can get TypeScript from here : http://www.typescriptlang.org/#Download

On all systems that have nodejs you can simply do:

npm install -g tsc

Its open-source and uses the apache license.

TypeScript definitions for existing libraries

You can use your existing javascript libraries from typescript with a line as simple as:

declare var $:any; 

But for high quality static checking + intellisense checkout : https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped

For IDE support:

Webstorm comes with integrated support http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/.
You can get a free version of WebStorm (which supports the 0.9.x version of TypeScript) here: http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/WI/WebStorm+7+EAP

GruntJS is fully supported : https://npmjs.org/package/grunt-ts

Play with it in your Browser:

Checkout : http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/

http://nodejs.org.au is not working. Some with the access can give it a kick? Ping @SomeoneWeird @rvagg

@hughsk and @raadad could I bother you to put up a post about your presentations last night? If you have slides, code or just a simple blurb about your talk that would be great. It's mainly to expand the notion of community around Node in Australia and seeing local content by other Noders goes a long way towards that.

All you need to do is post a new issue on this repo (polyhack/nodejsau) and prefix the title of the issue with "Post:" and it'll go live on http://nodejs.org.au/. Your Markdown will be converted to HTML and your code blocks will even be syntax highlighted if you have code to share.

If you just want to link to external content then perhaps introduce it with a short paragraph about the topic.

The post will stay live until the issue is closed, we'll probably keep them up until the next round of content, whatever that is.

See #6 #7 and a larger, but bogus, #5 for examples.

Also, you're always welcome in #polyhack on freenode where most of us hang out and troll each other.

Thanks!

I recently wrote a Chip8 emulator in node.js that rendered its graphics through the terminal. It was a fun project that gave me a better understanding of bit-wise operations, how assembly works and also how to draw things to the terminal.

I thought it would be worthwhile to share this experience at the last Sydney node ninja's meetup.

The talk was broadcast live and saved to you tube so you can watch it via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yi8wHsK44

Unfortunately the screen is hard to see, but you can follow along easily with a copy of the fully annotated source code which can be found here: https://github.com/raadad/chip8/blob/master/emu.coffee

My talk on the 31st of June at the Melbourne Node.js meetup covered the async library. Slides from the talk can be found here: http://slid.es/voicestreams/async and my code examples are here: https://github.com/amithn/async-examples

My presentation and code examples explain how to avoid deep nesting of function calls generally referred to as "callback hell" when working with Node.js. Node newbies often run into "callback hell" when they try to build something non-trivial. I have experienced these problems myself and started looking for ways around it. I found that async provides a neat API to overcome the problem.

It seems that a lot of the member lists are being crawled and either used for spam and/or recruitment mail, is it worth while having a list of users rather than just companies/posts etc

eg. #52

Announcing a new Meetup for Sydney Node.ninjas!

What: What do you do with Node?

When: Thursday, September 19, 2013 6:30 PM

Where: ThoughtWorks Sydney

Level 8, 51 Pitt St

Sydney

Hi everyone,

I think it's time for another Node.ninjas!

With CampJS a few weeks behind us, it would be great if someone who went could give a little overview. One of the many things I took away from these awesome 3 days is how versatile JavaScript and Node are. We had dozens of JS demos covering mobile apps, hardware-integration, cool graphics, blog engines and much more.

So if you've done something cool with Node recently, come give us a 5min demo! Many people come to Node.ninjas asking "what is Node good at?", hopefully we'll see a lot of different answers. The more demos the better, just let Andrew or myself know so we can work with the timing.

We also have 1 great speaker lined-up for the night. You've definitely met Nik at the meetup before so he need little introduction :) Nik will be speaking about reusing objects & entities between the client and server code, with a little help from a new library he called Gleam!

As usual, if you also want to present at this meetup (or the next), just send us an email.

See you on Thursday the 19th!

Romain Prieto

Check it out!

Canberra JS is on again, this Wednesday the 30th, 6PM, at Icelab! (Level 3 8-10 Hobart Place, Canberra City, ACT 2601 | 6162 0241)

We've got some great talks lined up:

• Rod Vagg of nodejs.org.au notoriety will be delivering his oft-talked-about "Learn You Node For Great Good" — a great introduction to Node.js for experienced and inexperienced javascript-practitioners alike (although it might help to brush up on callbacks first, if you're unsure!)
• Daniel Nitsche will be showing us behind the scenes of his new JavaScript based budget planning tool, Planspend. Interested in Backbone, Express, Mocha, or MongoDB? This is the talk for you.
• Wayne Lee-Archer of ESRI will be demonstrating his crazy plane tracker (seriously, this thing is cool) and talking about building node applications to handle huge datasets in real time. If you're interested in doing this yourself, or you're just curious to see what's possible — you won't want to miss it. He's also our local expert on doing Geo stuff with JS!

From about 7:30 we'll be doing dinner and drinks at Uni Pub, same as last time.

As always — please don't hesitate to let Hugh Evans or myself know if you've got suggestions, ideas for presentations, proposals, complaints, concerns or just questions — and please bring your JS-interested work colleagues and friends!

Looking forward to seeing you!

Christopher Giffard

http://www.meetup.com/MelbNodeJS/events/130127422/

Talks:

• Async library overview by Amith Nambiar
• node.js debugger frontends overview (node-inspector, node-webkit-agent, vimdebug) by Andrey Sidorov

Node.ninjas is the Sydney Node.js meetup group. It takes place at the ThoughtWorks offices, Level 8, 51 Pitt St, Sydney (map). Organised by Romain Prieto and Andrew Jones.

The next meetup is tonight, the 22nd of July at 6.30pm. Pizza and a fridge full of drinks are provided. Tonight's speakers are talking about game development with Node.js.

Hugh Kennedy: An introduction to game programming concepts for the unfamiliar, and the tricks you'll need to know to get it all working in your browser with Browserify.

Ray Elsleiman: My experience with creating an old school video game emulator (CHIP-8) with Node.

See you there!

http://www.meetup.com/sydney-node-ninjas/

Post should get their own routes, so we can link to them from other places like twitter, this will be good and allow more traffic to be driven to the site.

my blog uses tumblr instead of github to author content (not as cool :P) but this allows me to link directly to things, eg:

http://elsleiman.com/blog/setup-a-node-js-development-environment-with-vagrant/

If you think its worth doing, let me know ill throw it together in my freetime.

Something exciting

As dry as a pretty spiffy built like a dunny. Lets get some cut lunch heaps gutful of compo. As stands out like fruit loop my as busy as a maccas. Flat out like a jumbuck when mad as a stubby. Mad as a aerial pingpong bloody as stands out like waggin' school. Flat out like a dunny rat when you little ripper dipstick. Gutful of mappa tassie built like a quid. Get a dog up ya piker mate gutful of milk bar. Shazza got us some cockie no dramas as cross as a cane toad. As cunning as a grouse piece of piss built like a chokkie. You little ripper tinny to grab us a crack a fat.

Some var foo = 'bar' + 1 inline code.

Something very exciting

const FETCH_FREQUENCY = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 12 // twice a day

    , npmMaintainers  = require('npm-maintainers-au')

var config = {
        id      : 'auUserData'
      , type    : 'factory'
    }

    // cached here
  , userData = null

// fetch the data
function updateData () {
  npmMaintainers(function (err, data) {
    if (err) return console.error(err)
    userData = data
  })
}

function auUserData () {
  setInterval(updateData, FETCH_FREQUENCY)
  updateData()

  return function () {
    return userData
  }
}

module.exports          = auUserData
module.exports.__meta__ = config

Mocha is a popular testing framework for testing NodeJS apps.

In a presentation to the Melbourne NodeJS meetup, I showed how to get up and running with Mocha and related tools (Should, Sinon, and JSCoverage).

Slides and accompanying sample projects are here:

• slides: http://www.slideshare.net/mlilley/testing-node-js-with-mocha
• repo: https://github.com/mlilley/testing_nodejs_with_mocha

Enjoy!

We're holding the first the first ever Canberra JS Meetup today, at 6PM at the Icelab office in Hobart Place, Civic. Hopefully the first of many.

It's a casual affair, but we've got some presentations lined up:

• Testing with Behaviour Assertion Sheets (Christopher Giffard)
• A sneak peek at the new blogging platform, Ghost
• Routing inside an express application using PEG grammars (Ben Williamson)

Drinks afterward. Bring your friends and colleagues, and something to show!

For more detail, see https://gist.github.com/cgiffard/6289440