Tonight I made it to my second Austin JavaScript Meetup and I left thinking "Dammit! Why have I been missing these?!" Well, I know why but the point is, I'm there now and plan on making the rest of them.

Tonight Joe McCann gave a talk (with attempted demo) of node.js. Things went wrong as coding live is often prone to do and we were left with more of an explanation than a demo. Still, Joe's an excellent speaker, engages the audience well and does a good job of keeping the banter going while working through the issues. I've learned the JS group has no lack of banter.

Andrew Dupont gave a detailed demo about scripty2, the successor to script.aculo.us with specific highlighting of the trials and tribulations of CSS Transitions. The picture he painted was grim and discouraging for blazing out on your own and doing the CSS Animations yourself. Of course, that's where scripty2 comes to save the day. It normalizes the behavior across all reasonable browsers. It's still in alpha but has some promising merits. I'll be interested to see where this ends up going.

All in all, this was a fruitful meeting and I may break down and present something next month. To be certain, I don't have the polish of these presenters so it's something I will have to give some thought to. We'll see...