Despite the explosion of tools and MVC frameworks for JavaScript, jQuery remains the dependency of dependencies for almost every browser based web application. And yet, for most of us, our use of jQuery tends to create the code with the most painful, rambling, and troublesome design.

This is a talk about using CoffeeScript’s native language constructs to apply what we have learned from frameworks and tools like Backbone and Bootstrap. Solutions that promise us a better experience, retain relevance and clarity in our code, and respond more easily to change.

Refresh this month is scheduled for the 18th, which unfortunately means that I won’t be there. Can I get a volunteer to MC this month? Speaking of, here are the details:

• What: Refresh Savannah
• When: 6/18 @ 6PM
• Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd floor

I would say I hope to see you there, but I won’t be there! So, I hope you make it.

Update: Erik Reagan, from FocusLab, has graciously agreed to MC this month. Thanks, Erik!

Also, don’t forget that TEDx Creative Coast is this Friday! If you didn’t grab a ticket, you can watch it live on the site starting around 9AM on Friday!

Want to hack for a change? Here’s your chance. The National Day of Civic Hacking unites technologists, civil servants, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers – anybody – who is willing to collaborate with others to create, build, and invent to address challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country.

Join us June 1st at noon at ThincSavannah for the National Day of Civic Hacking. So we know how much pizza to buy, please register here

I think it’s really cool that we’re having one of these in Savannah and a huge internet high five to the folks organizing it!

Also, Refresh is tomorrow night! It’s our fourth anniversary (which I didn’t realize until I saw an old tweet about it in Timehop). I hope to see you all there!

This will be a (hopefully offensive) overview of the current relationship between local news and the Internet / social media. As a web developer AND an alum of two local photojournalist jobs (with several years writing for the Savannah Morning News), my experience is squarely at the intersection of local journalism and the web. I’ve spent the last 6 years trying to reconcile the two industries (the web and local news), and I think I’ve finally come up with some answers.

Sounds interesting, right? Well, you should come! Here are the details:

• When: Tuesday, 5/21 @ 6PM
• Where: ThincSavannah, 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor

I hope to see you there!

The world of programming languages has not changed much in the last thirty years. The ideas that we hold dear today, in many cases, were held just as dear by our industry forefathers. This poses a problem to our world of technology. As our ideas and desires get bigger and bolder, the languages used to express those ideas remains stagnant. We need new languages, with new abstractions, that take advantage of the wonderfully technological world we currently live in and that our children will create.

Discourse is an exercise in creating a language to express these bold, new ideas. Discourse is inspired by the syntax of Smalltalk and Ruby, with the semantics of Carl Hewitt’s Actor Model. At its core, Discourse is an ideology with three tenets: the Earth we live on is the perfect role-model for any system we desire to create, therefore Discourse shall be concurrency all the way down, our world is a place of social connections, therefore the semantics of Discourse shall depend on the Internet as opposed to punishing it to libraries, and the privacy of all Actors within a system is paramount, therefore all communications in Discourse shall be encrypted.

I hope to see all of you there and full of crazy questions for Mark! If you’d like to be adventurous and provide food and/or beverages for this month’s meeting, please let me know!

And the details:

• When: Tuesday 4/16 @ 6PM
• Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor
• What & Who: The Age of Social Machines by Mark Stahl

I’m really looking forward to this one, so I hope you can all come out! Also, we don’t have a speaker for June yet. If you’ve got something you’re passionate about and can’t wait to tell everyone, please let me know!

Update: Thanks to TalentSoup for providing beverages for this month’s meeting!

Here’s his description:

Building Native Mobile apps isn’t only for those that know Objective-C and Java. Learn how you can create a native mobile application using Javascript via Appcelerator’s open sourced Titanium Mobile SDK. Titanium provides direct access to native Android and iOS controls and device functionality well beyond any other solutions on the market. The benefit to developers is the ability to create native applications with less code for multiple devices and still maintain an experience users expect from native mobile applications. If you understand Javascript then you should come out and see how this can help you venture into mobile application development.

Refreshments and giveaways provided by Appcelerator (but Will assures me this isn’t a sales pitch, we’re really going to learn something!)

Details:

• When: 3/19/2013 @ 6PM
• Where: ThincSavannah, 35 Barnard St, 3rd floor

I hope to see you there! Also, if you’d like to speak at Refresh, please email kevin@lawver.net. Refresh only works if we have speakers!!

Here’s his description:

In this talk, I will provide insight into how the modern agriculture system works and why it needs a revolution. From there, I will share how I have turned my vision for fixing it into realty.

So, come ready to talk about food! Mmmm, food!

Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor
When: 10/16 @ 6PM

I hope to see you there!

So, for those of you who are thinking of pursuing development as your career path (or second or third career path), come talk to a bunch of developers about what they do, how they do it and what keeps them going. Bring your questions about what it’s like to be a developer (rock star or otherwise) and get them answered by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

This one’s going to be a little different – and I don’t want it to be me talking the whole time. I’d love to get some developers to volunteer (either in the comments or email me – lawver-at-gmail.com) to share their “day in the life” stories about what kind of work they do, how they work, the tools you use, etc. Nothing formal and you wouldn’t have to talk more than five minutes (really).

And if there’s time, I’d also like to chat about the Developer Boot Camp that I posted about earlier, talk about what we’re planning to do and see if anyone’s interested in either attending or helping out.

What: Refresh Savannah: A Day in the Life of a Developer
When: 9/18 @ 6PM (I originally said the 17th, but that’s Monday and Refresh is always on Tuesdays)
Where: ThincSavannah – 35 Barnard St, 3rd Floor

I hope to see you there!

The idea is to do this a little backwards from a typical classroom experience. There would be homework every week consisting of screencasts, blog posts and other resources. You’d be expected to go through the homework during the week, and then the weekend classroom time would be spent answering questions, troubleshooting, mentoring and working on actually building stuff. We’re planning on running two tracks – frontend and backend (the backend track most likely being Rails) – and running it in September and maybe doing something crazy awesome for graduation.

So, if you would be so kind as to participate in my highly scientific poll and send it around to folks in the area you think might be interested (students, designers, career switchers, etc), I’d appreciate it. Please post comments with questions or suggestions and let’s see if we can pull this off!

(if you’re reading this in the email, you’ll probably need to come to the site to participate in the poll)

I know, it sounds like fun, right? The deadline to register your company for the fun is the 18th, so get going!

We’ll be back in July, really!