Tags: asyncjs

Back in 2019 I had the amazing experience of going to CERN and being part of a team building an emulator of the first ever browser.

Remy was on the team too. He did the heavy lifting of actually making the thing work—quite an achievement in just five days!

Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document the historical context of the time. Now that it’s all done, I’m somewhat astounded that we managed to achieve both.

Remy and I were both keen to talk about the work, which is why we did a joint talk at Fronteers in Amsterdam that year. We’re both quite sceptical of talks given by duos; people think it means it’ll be half the work, when actually it’s twice the work. In the end we come up with a structure for the talk that we both liked:

Now, we could’ve just done everything chronologically, but that would mean I’d do the first half of the talk and Remy would do the second half. That didn’t appeal. And it sounded kind of boring. So then we come up with the idea of interweaving the two timelines.

That worked remarkably well.

You can watch the video of that talk in Amsterdam. You can also read the transcript.

After putting so much work into the talk, we were keen to give it again somewhere. We had the chance to do that in Nottingham in early March 2020. (cue ominous foreboding)

The folks from local Brighton meetup Async had also asked if we wanted to give the talk. We were booked in for May 2020. (ominous foreboding intensifies)

We all know what happened next. The Situation. Lockdown. No conferences. No meetups.

But technically the talk wasn’t cancelled. It was just postponed. And postponed. And postponed. Before you know it, five years have passed.

Part of the problem was that Async is usually on the first Thursday of the month and that’s when I host an Irish music session in Hove. I can’t miss that!

But finally the stars aligned and last week Remy and I finally did the Async talk. You can watch a video of it.

I really enjoyed giving the talk and the discussion that followed. There was a good buzz.

It also made me appreciate the work that we put into stucturing the talk. We’ve only given it a few times but with a five year gap between presentations, I can confidentally say that’s it’s a timeless topic.

It’s been a fun post-dConstruct week. Tantek has been staying in Brighton being, as always, the perfect guest. On his last night in the country, we went along to Async, the local JavaScript twice-monthly meet-up, host to a show’n’tell this time ‘round.

Tantek demoed his Cassis project. It’s nuts. He’s creating polyglot scripts that are simultaneously JavaScript and PHP, as well as having the ability to report which context they are running in. I feel partly responsible for this madness: he got the idea the last time he was in Brighton after reading Bulletproof Ajax and deciding that he didn’t want to write the same logic twice in two different programming languages. The really crazy thing is that he’s got it working.

Prem, who organised the event, showed his Sandie code: a security mechanism that allows external scripts to be loaded and arbitrary JavaScript to be executed without affecting the global scope. It’s smart stuff that could be incredibly useful for his sqwidget work.

Mark demoed one of the coolest bookmarklets I’ve seen in a while: Snoopy:

It’s intended for use on mobile browsers where you can’t view-source to poke around under the hood of sites to see how they’re built.

If the lack of “view source” on the iPad and iPhone has been bothering you, Snoopy is your friend.

Alas, we had to leave the Async awesomeness early to rendez-vous with the Mozilla HTML5 meet-up in The Eagle so I didn’t even get to see Jim demo the disco snake that he made at Music Hack Day last weekend.