Speaker: Thilo Utke
I like to talk about my private relationship with JavaScript. How I met it for the first time and disregarded it, like most others. How I fell in love with a beautiful language called Ruby and how it first tried to hide JavaScript from me with Rails. But one day I found jQuery which was fixing browser bugs and was less nasty than the JavaScript code that Rails pretended was not there. After that Sammy came along and showed me that MVC apps are sane in Javascript too. From there everything happened quickly. I heard the excitement from the first JSConf that Javascript had freed itself from the browser with node.js. I saw what wonderful crazy things were possible at js1K and that there were LASERS, a thing I never had in Ruby. I wanted to know more about this language, so I joined the newly founded Berlin JavaScript user group, attended the second JSConf.eu and ordered books that would make me a Ninja with patterns. I still sucked at JavaScript, but while I was reading these books JavaScript unfurled its beauty to me. While I advanced in JavaScript more things happened. Jed Schmidt, the JavaScript Maniac, kept blowing people's minds with 140 byt.es hacks that exploited the language brutally. In the end it all came together at nodecamp.eu where Ryan Dahl hacked happy as a child in C and I discovered that CoffeeScript looks a lot like Ruby. Language nirvana and world peace were in reach.
The ruby guy that goes javascript
