Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Fluent 2014 Talk Summaries, continued

"Reading, Writing, Arithmetic... and JavaScript?"


Pamela Fox, the person behind the JavaScript-based programming curriculum at Khan Academy, discusses how age affects a person's ability to learn programming and says that most 13 year olds are capable of learning basic programming skills that will help them explore other fields like art, history and language.  Visit Khan Academy for more information on their Computer Programming curriculum.


My rating: 3/5.  Introduces a great educational resource for young people. Plus, I've been a fan of Pamela's work ever since I read her articles on JavaScript widgets at Coursera.

[video]

"Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler"


Popular podcaster Scott Hanselman delivers a humorous talk describing how the basic features of an operating system exist in both the cloud and the browser.

My rating: 3/5. Entertaining for programmers, though light on technical take-aways.

[video]

"The Humble Border-Radius"


In this talk Lea Verou demonstrates how border radii can be used to create a variety of shapes and animations, as well as upcoming CSS specifications for different corner shapes. While interesting, I think what web designers really want is complete flexibility to design arbitrary shapes, and border-radius seems like a very awkward mechanism for accomplishing that.

My rating: 3/5. Interesting CSS hacks.

[video]

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