Meteor Devshop 2: Meteor 101, How Spark Works, & other wisdom
By Jade Wang
(Video Editing by Alice Yu)
Meteor Devshop 2. Meteorites being excellent to each other: drop in, plug in, and help each other build things. (Meteor Devshop Photo Album)
Last month’s Meteor Devshop, our monthly co-working meetup, was the largest ever with over 110 Meteorites in attendance. A lot of Meteorites who dropped in for Meteor Devshop 1 have made some amazing progress, which was great to see. Also at this Devshop, other Meteorites announced that they are seeking to hire Meteorites to make apps.
Meteor Devshop 2. More Meteorites in one place. (Meteor Devshop Photo Album)
Tech Talks at Meteor Devshop
There have been some truly amazing talks at Meteor Devshop lately, which leads to the need to keep track of them efficiently. The solution, 26Plays, is playlist management made beautiful. It is a Meteor app that makes it possible to collaboratively construct and share playlists across video providers. And for the foreseeable future, 26Plays will be my personal go-to method for organizing tech talk videos. Thank you so much, Benjamin Chelli, for building this.
Lightning Talks
The Lightning Talks for Meteor Devshop 2 showcased the amazing work of Meteorites from this past month.
- Howard Tang showed off Routrrr, which is a shared Google map that makes it easier for friends to meet up at cafes located between them.
- Ben Morrow demo’d Draggables, a simple cross-platform proof-of-concept game.
- As seen on Hacker News, Mike Adams’s Instahood is the Instagraph/GoogleMaps integration that allows you to see Instagram pictures from anywhere in the world.
- David Glasser previewed the new features of Meteor 0.6.0: the new release system, NPM integration, and app packages.
- Dror Matalon shared Meteor SQL, that is, how to use mySQL with Meteor, and how it works.
- John Katsnelson showcased Deface, a way to deface pictures in true MS Paint style.
- Gavin McDermott shared his Rooms smart package, and walks through how to use it to easily define chat rooms.
- Last but not least, James Gill and Mike Risse showed off MadEye.io and what they can do in 3 minutes of impressively intense collaborative live-coding in the browser.
Tech Talks
Shortly after dinner, Chris Mather, author of the EventedMind screencasts, went on a deep dive into Spark, and explained how rendering works in Meteor.
Then, Ted Blackman, co-founder of Jewish dating site JSpot, shared some of the wisdom he learned while building his startup’s application in Meteor.
Devshop Questions
Last time we saw that Meteorites who had questions weren’t sure whom to ask for help, and Meteorites who had expertise didn’t know whom to help. So this time, we tried something different. During the day, whenever anyone had a question or needed help, they could post their question to the Devshop Questions app and an experienced Meteorite would come by to assist them. A special thanks to all the extraordinarily helpful teaching assistants from Meteor Devshop 2, who volunteered to answer their fellow Meteorites’ questions:
Devshop Questions. Meteorites help each other by sharing their knowledge. Anyone can post a question to the DevshopQuestions app and an experienced Meteorite stops by to help. (Meteor Devshop Photo Album)
Meteor 101
Upstairs, Naomi gave her first Meteor 101, live-coding an application from scratch. For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a recording of the session.
Stay tuned for Meteor Devshop 3. Looking forward to all the awesome new projects at the nextLighting Talks.
Upcoming Meteor-related events worldwide:
- April 11, 2013 Dnipropetrovas’k, Ukraine «Метеор» — Дмитрий Овчаренко (Off Ruby topic)
- April 12, 2013 SF Bay Area: Mountain View, CA, USA CMU-SV HTML5 Single Page App Hackathon (Matt Debergalis)
- April 13, 2013 Mumbai, India Time for the first Mumbai Meteor Meetup
- April 14, 2013 Tokyo, Japan Meteor公式Meetup with Qiita
- April 18, 2013 Munich, Germany Let’s talk Meteor
- April 25, 2013 London, UK Show & Tell & Ale
- April 25, 2013 SF Bay Area: San Francisco, CA, USA Meteor Devshop 3 (RSVP available soon)
- April 27, 2013 Berlin, Germany Meteor Berlin Devshop
- April 27, 2013 Turin, Italy Primo incontro sviluppatori Javascript interessati a Meteor
- April 27, 2013 Minneapolis, MN, USA Twin Cities Code Camp — Come for the Meteor Session!
- June 17, 2013 Hamburg, Germany HH.js Meetup — Vitus Lorenz-Meyer: Meteor Next-Generation Web-Development
- June 28–29, 2013 Johannesburg, South Africa Che’ Nxusani at The Javascript Developer’s Conference
