Day 1 of YUIConf 2011 is over. I didn't keep copious notes that are coherent to anyone but myself. Here is a congealed version of my notes (hopefully they aren't too hard to follow).
Dav Glass - Keynote
Dav said something that seemed to ring very true to me about the "Graded Browser Scale". Instead of talking about browser support, he started referring to it as a list of platforms to test on. If everything works on that list of platforms, it should work on everything. This is usually the way that I think about testing my own projects, and probably the way we should start thinking about Ubuntu One (granted that we don't see too much IE 6/7 on Ubuntu One currently).
The YUI team is starting to think more about time based releases. Having worked for Canonical for so long, I love the "cadence" that time-based releases bring. I hope this means new YUI features are available in a faster manner, but mostly I'm looking forward to the promise of being more open with what features are being worked on. It seems that we at Ubuntu One aren't the only ones implementing things that the YUI team end up releasing right after we finish writing it.
Luke Smith - From one, many; From many, one
One of the hardest and most overwhelming things about YUI is figuring out how to implement features. Should I use a Plugin, a Widget, or an Extension. Along with that, if you're used to class-based inheritance, inheritance (or the oddities thereof) of javascript is a little awkward. In general, for what I'm building, I don't need to worry about how the constructors link together, so I usually just build off of Y.Base and everything is fine.
One really important thing I had previously personally asserted and Luke confirmed to me is this: Unless you have a valid reason, use Y.Base.create.
Jeff Craig - Demystifying Loader
This was easily the best talk I went to today. The YUI Loader is a fantastic little piece of YUI, but it's also a black hole for documentation and isn't something most people grok. At Ubuntu One, we use convoy for combo loading YUI, and our configuration is a bit complicated. I've known about some of the things we could do to make it less complicated, but this was pretty beneficial for me. Particularly, the Loader can conditionally load modules, which should help in cases where we use modules to "monkey-patch" other modules in certain cases coughIOcough.
Ryan Cannon - There is no off-season.
Ryan talked about implementing YUI on NFL.com. This is very similar to a talk I proposed for YUIConf this year as well. Essentially, I like the stories of "This is how we got our site all working in YUI". They wrote a really neat sounding widget they called WidgetFold that only rendered the widget once the user scrolled down to see the widget. I can think of all kinds of uses for that kind of widget.
The highlight of Ryan's talk was "Are you writing scripts or building applications?" He used it in the context of picking the right tool for the job. I often bring up this theme when people ask "Why not just use jQuery?", but the way Ryan phrased it is pretty excellent.
I bypassed taking notes for the last two talks of the day. After dinner, Douglas Crockford spoke. My notes would make absolutely no sense, in that they are all over the place. The talk was about jslint (which Doug wrote). As a summarizing quote (although it doesn't nearly do the talk justice), I noted "use of good style can help reduce errors".
Afterwards, someone pointed me to the github issues page for jslint. Doug's responses are pure comedy. Next time I'm having a bad day, instead of going to laugh at bad Craigslist personals, I'm going to laugh at jslint issues on Github.