I just found out that the videos from both the JSConf 2011 and NodeConf conferences held earlier this year, are available online.

First off, the conference has an Oregon Trail theme, which I did not understand until I saw this video by author Sloane Crosley, which explains the game’s appeal delightfully. (Skip to about the 2 minute mark for the actual reading)

Here are the ones I have checked out so far:

Bytes and Blobs (David Flanagan)

A really good explanation of the new Binary APIs for Javascript. Nice to see the author of the great Rhino book in person (at least virtually.) Kind of amusing to hear all the talk of BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects). This opens up a number of interesting possibilities, such as getting access to files from the user’s filesystem (with their permission, after they have selected it) without uploading them. Also image processing, and even audio processing and generation. However, browser support is still incomplete… Let’s hope IE supports these APIs in it’s next version.

The Future of Javascript (Rebecca Murphey)

This is a call to action to ensure that Javascript evolves properly, to prevent some of the quagmires we currently experience as developers. In a nutshell, we need to agree on common standards and protocols to prevent duplication of effort. Some of this work is underway, eg CommonJS, promisesA. Also some interesting facts about the history of the automobile and the road system which we take for granted.

The Future of JS and You (Alex Russel and Peter Hallman)

A look behind the scenes of the Traceur Javascript compiler, which lets you write futuristic Harmony flavored Javascript, and generates present-day Javascript. This reminds me a bit of CoffeeScript, though here you’re still writing Javascript, albeit a version which does not yet exist. The suggestion is that you can invent your own Javascript.next features and hack the compiler to support them. If you’re interested in writing a compiler in Javascript, this would be a good place to start.

‘Freestyle RPC for Node’ (James Halliday) An entertaining presentation on James’s dnode node module which allows seamless remoting between client and server code. perhaps not the most elucidating presentation (there is about 10min of random rapping towards the end) but DNode does indeed look awesome.

It seems like every single session from these conferences is available here. The only confusing thing is that the videos do not always have the same titles as the sessions at the conferences, so you may need to cross-reference with the jsconf programme

Ah, I am so nostalgic for the old NodeJS logo :/