As we announced at the end of jQuery San Diego in February, we’re excited that the next stop for #jqcon is Chicago! In case you missed the news, we’ll be setting up shop in the City That Never Sleeps Isn’t Windy on September 12th & 13th, 2014. We’re partnering again with Bocoup to make it a four-day affair, bringing you Roost on September 11th & 12th.

Speaker Filing Extension

While we can’t do anything about today’s deadline for those of us in the US to file our tax returns, we can offer our own form of amnesty: a two-week-plus extension of our Call for Speakers until the end of April! If you got swamped in receipts – or anything else – and thought you’d missed your chance to submit, breathe a sigh of relief, and if you didn’t know the call was even open, this should hopefully provide you enough time to come up with a solid talk proposal. (And if you already have submitted, thanks!)

We’re experimenting a bit with our time slot construction in Chicago, so if you have a talk that you feel needs to go deep into technical material and run for 45 minutes or an hour, or want to lead a more hands-on-workshop type of session for even longer, we’re eager to hear about it and encourage you to to get in touch with questions about your ideas at content@jquery.org or on the #jquery-content channel on Freenode.

Join Us

Our early bird tickets have been going fast and will likely be gone before our original early-bird cutoff of May 31st, so if you’re aiming to keep another 50 bucks in your deep-dish pizza budget, you’ll want to act sooner than later!

The conference will be right downtown at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, and we’re able to offer attendees of both jQuery Chicago and Roost a discounted rate if you register as part of our room block.

Join Us…Together!

We’ve always held that jQuery is better with friends, and if you’ve got colleagues you want to attend with or send to the conference, we have group packages available that include sponsorships and discounts. Get in touch with us for a prospectus and to figure out how to get your team to Chicago!

A “Rocky” Start

If the prospect of jQuery’s first foray into the Old Northwest wasn’t exciting enough, we’re psyched to inform you that we’ll be giving away classic Pebble devices throughout ticket sales. We’ll take a random draw of people who’ve bought tickets each month and select 2-3 folks who’ll receive a Pebble from us (and the kind folks at Pebble who’ve donated the devices) at the conference in September. The sooner you buy, the better your odds, so what are you waiting for? This post is over anyway!

As I sit here in New York City in the wake of a nor’easter that just hammered the, uh, Northeast, it’s hard not for me to be excited for the next jQuery Conference, which is just three short weeks away in sunny San Diego, California. So excited, in fact, that I wanted to take a couple minutes to bring you up to speed on what we’ve got in store for you the week of February 10th!

That’s What I’m Talking About

If you missed our announcements over at @jqcon over the past few weeks, we’ve rolled out a great lineup of speakers, who will be presenting on an array of subjects covering jQuery and beyond. We’ll be hosting our first-ever guest keynotes, as we proudly welcome chat.meatspac.es creatorbro herself, Edna Piranha, who’ll share both the history and the future of the web’s first ephemeral, WebRTC-powered, animated-GIF-generating chat service, and Scott Hanselman, who’ll discuss JavaScript’s impact on application architecture and its growing appeal as a compilation target. As usual, project leads Dave Methvin and Scott González will start off each day with keynotes updating you on what’s new in jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile development.

We’re back to our familiar two-track lineup, and this time we’ve curated them in order to help you get a well-rounded look at JavaScript and front-end development tools and techniques that you can go back home and use. As always, you’re of course free to pick and choose between talks in both tracks.

First up is our Fundamentals track. With talks ranging from debugging and scope to the basics of testing (and automating that testing), the Fundamentals track is meant to help introduce and reinforce common and emerging concepts and practices that are integral to building successful web apps today. It’s far from a refresher course, however, and also includes subjects like how to secure client side apps, responsive design, and how to organize jQuery and JavaScript applications to keep them lean and mean.

Next door, we’ll have our Code For Thought track, a wide-ranging exploration of a breadth of topics related to the ever-changing world of web application development with JavaScript. We’ll talk about how jQuery 2.0 and its modular build system make jQuery an even more viable candidate for even low-bandwidth situations, and how you can apply performance improvements in jQuery Mobile 1.4 to your own applications. We’ll spend plenty of time looking at newer technologies, including Firefox OS, new HTML5 speech APIs, and Node.js. And we’ll dive deep, discussing advanced subjects like implementing code coverage analysis, building your own tools, writing third-party JavaScript apps, and why jQuery is still an incredibly useful tool even as the browser landscape has improved over the last few years.

With over 30 talks, this is only a sampling of the speakers and subjects on offer. We’re sure jQuery San Diego will have more than a little bit of something for everyone; head on over to review the whole program to see the full abstracts for all of our sessions.

The Roost Boost

This year, we’re partnering with Bocoup to extend the festivities, bringing you a pre-conference training event in the form of Roost, a two-day intensive course on crafting modern web applications taught by Ben Alman, Irene Ros, Mike Pennisi, and Bob Holt. Roost is targeted at developers who already know JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS, and are looking to understand how to develop a better workflow for building, testing, and maintaining their applications and incorporate technologies like Backbone, RequireJS, Stylus, and more. You can check out the full training curriculum and schedule to find out exactly what’s planned.

We Like, We Like To Party

We’re happy to announce that we’re hosting a conference party at Fiesta de Reyes after the first day of talks, February 12. Located just a trolley ride away from the conference in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town, it’s a great spot and we’re looking forward to having a few hours to relax with the community – food and drinks are on us!

Brought To You By

We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to the sponsors who are stepping up to help us put together a great jQuery Conference: Diamond sponsor WordPress, Platinum sponsor MaxCDN, Gold sponsors Bocoup & BrowserStack, and Silver sponsors WalmartLabs & New Relic. Thanks! (We’re still welcoming sponsors – if you’d like to have your company be a part of #jqcon, please get in touch!)

Student Discount

We’re glad to be able to offer a discount to current students. Anyone from kindergarten right on up through graduate school may use coupon code jqstudentSD14 to save $100 off a ticket to jQuery San Diego or a combo ticket to jQCon and Roost. Though we know the discount is modest, this is the first time we’ve been able to offer a student discount of any kind, so we hope it helps. Please be advised that if you use this discount, you’ll need to show a valid student ID at registration.

I Read This Whole Blog Post, What’s In It For Me?

Fifty bucks! No joke – register now for jQuery Conference, Roost, or both using discount code jqblog50 to save an $50 on your ticket!

We’ve been working hard to make our trip to the west coast the best #jqcon yet, and hope you’ll be able to be part of the whole week. Check out the conference site for more on our program and speakers, lodging, and to buy your tickets. If you have any questions, always feel free to get in touch with us on Twitter or via e-mail.

jQuery UK is back for 2014!

The jQuery Foundation is pleased to announce that the third annual jQuery UK will take place on May 16, 2014 in Oxford, UK. This event is organised by White October Events.

jQuery UK is the UK’s largest front-end developer conference. Over one day and three tracks,  pioneers of the world’s favourite JavaScript framework and wider industry experts will deliver technical content to inspire front-end and full stack developers to do more in the browser and beyond.

Confirmed speakers include Tilde co-founder and jQuery Board member Yehuda Katz, CSS expert Lea Verou, and the author of this very blog post (and jQuery developer relations lead), Adam J. Sontag.

There are also four hands-on workshops taking place the day before the conference. Choose from:

• Advanced jQuery Techniques
• Web Developers Toolbox
• jQuery UI Foundations
• Diving into AngularJS

Space for these workshops is strictly limited, so book early to secure your spot!

A limited number of Early Bird tickets are on sale until January 31, for £130 + VAT or until they sell out. Full price tickets will be available for £175 + VAT.

To book tickets or sign up for updates, visit jqueryuk.com. You can also track jQuery UK on lanyrd.com and follow @jquk for updates.

With 2013 rapidly drawing to a close, we’re excited to announce that jQuery’s first stop in 2014 will be in lovely San Diego, California on Wednesday, February 12 and Thursday, February 13! It’s our first trip to San Diego, and we’re hoping you’ll join us at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center to beat the winter doldrums for a week that will be chock-full of jQuery, JavaScript, and front-end development, and how the latest and greatest relates to what you do every day.

The early bird gets the worm – and saves fifty bucks – so get your tickets now!

Call for Speakers

As always, we’re looking for great speakers to help us make jQuery San Diego into a conference that’s both edifying and entertaining. In the same way that jQuery is but one of the many tools that front-end developers use regularly, jQuery Conference is an opportunity to present and learn about the many technologies and practices that help us build web apps today. In other words, we’re eager to hear proposals about HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, testing, tooling, deploying, mobile, responsive design, and pretty much anything else relevant to front-end engineering today. (Of course, proposals about jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile are happily welcomed as well.)

Our call for speakers is open from now through November 10, 2013, and we’re hoping to hear from speakers with a diverse range of experience as conference speakers, web developers, and people! If you have any questions about speaking at jQuery San Diego, please get in touch with us on Twitter @jqcon or via e-mail at content at jquery dot org.

Level Up With Roost

For San Diego’s pre-conference training, we’re partnering with Bocoup to bring you Roost, a two-day training conference that’s a great opportunity to increase your skills with many aspects of web development, including jQuery & JavaScript, HTML & CSS, unit testing, and more. If you’re a beginning-to-intermediate web developer looking to make the most of your trip and warm up before jQuery Conference, Roost’s two days of practical guidance on February 10-11 make a great complement to your week.

Roost and jQuery Conference will both be at the Town and Country Resort, with individual tickets available for each event, as well as a discounted combination ticket to both events.

That’s All…For Now

Tickets for jQuery Conference and Roost are on sale now, and supplies of early bird tickets are limited! We can’t wait to start reviewing your proposals and announce the speaker lineup, but until then, follow @jqcon for news and updates! We’re also looking for sponsors to team up with us and help make our time in San Diego as awesome as possible, so if your company wants to get involved, get in touch with us for a sponsorship packet and more information.

This year, we’re happy to be able to resume our tradition of throwing two jQuery Conferences and announce that we’re headed for the first time to Austin, Texas! jQuery Austin is set for Tuesday, September 10 and Wednesday, September 11 at the Austin Convention Center, and we’re planning to host a discussion of the latest developments in jQuery, as well as other tools and techniques from around the world of front end development.

Call for Proposals

We’re looking for speakers who can bring a broad array of perspectives on subjects that cross the spectrum of technologies that are used in tandem with jQuery every day. We love listening to ideas about jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile, but we know there’s a lot more out there. JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, mobile, testing, deployment, and growing as a developer are all subjects jQuery users are eager to hear more about, so if you’ve got something you want to share with the community, we’d love to hear from you.

Our Call for Proposals will be open through July 14th, so we’re hoping to hear from you soon! We’re returning to a single-track format for jQuery Austin, so we’re expecting to have to make some tough decisions once we’ve reviewed the proposals; nevertheless, the only way to be considered is to submit in the first place!

Pre-Conference Training

If you’re looking to understand how to become a better developer and leverage newer features in jQuery, Bocoup‘s jQuery Essentials course on Monday, September 9 is just such an opportunity. The class is taught by Query plugin auteur extraordinaire and Grunt creator Ben Alman, and it’s a great chance to bone up on your skills before the conference begins.

Tickets and Accommodations

Tickets are on sale now, with early-bird pricing available through July 16. You can buy a single ticket for both events, or you can choose to attend only the conference or the training.

We’ve reserved blocks of rooms at the nearby Hyatt Place and Radisson hotels, both of which will leave you just steps from the convention center and downtown Austin.

See You There!

We’re thrilled to be adding some southwestern flavor to #jqcon. The city offers a great backdrop for a few days of learning and connecting with the of the jQuery community while enjoying the BBQ and music. As the saying* goes, “You’ll always remember an Austin September!” Follow @jqcon for news and updates as we have them, we look forward to having you join us in Austin! In the meantime, consider submitting a talk and polishing your cowboy boots!

* This is not actually a saying.

With just over a month remaining until the jQuery Foundation heads to the Pacific Northwest for jQuery Portland, the first U.S. jQuery Conference of 2013, we thought we’d take a moment to bring you up to speed on what we’ve been preparing for when we set up camp on Thursday, June 13 and Friday, June 14 at the Oregon Convention Center.

What’s In Store

We had such a great response to our Call For Papers that picking “only” 31 talks was a real challenge! Our goal was to put together a program that has something for developers with all levels of experience across the entire spectrum of front-end development, and we’re really proud of the results (and our amazing speakers, most of whom are presenting at their first jQuery conference). We’ve put together a Twitter list of all our speakers if you want to connect with them in advance.

If you’re out for the latest and greatest, you’ll probably want to spend a lot of your time in Track A, where we’ll be covering (amongst other things) how and when to use native HTML5 and CSS3 solutions to problems often solved with jQuery, mobile and A/B testing strategies, new technologies like WebRTC and Web Components, as well as future plans for selectors and indeed, JavaScript itself.

Track B, on the other hand, is a great place to shore up your foundations and learn where to take your next steps as a developer. We’ll be covering a whole lot, including JavaScript fundamentals, code organization, unit testing, single page applications (and the frameworks often used to build them), Node.js, and avoiding the kinds of small mistakes that can turn into big problems later.

Of course, you’re free to go to whichever sessions you like in either track, and there’s a lot more on offer, including a few sessions on how to learn and teach yourself and your colleagues, as well as keynotes from project leads on the latest developments in the jQuery ecosystem. Take a look at the full program to see all the talks and read the full abstracts.

Tickets & Accommodations

We’ll be selling regular conference tickets until the end of May, at which point we’ll only be selling “late-bird” tickets, which will cost $50 more, so if you’re planning to join us in Portland, you’ll probably want to act now before the price goes up!

jQuery Foundation members will always be able to buy a ticket for the discounted price of $399, so now’s a great time consider joining the jQuery Foundation to show your support and save a bit as well!

There are still hotel rooms available in our room block at the DoubleTree Portland, but the group rate of $144 per night is only guaranteed for reservations made by May 27th.

If you’re looking to bone up on your jQuery skills before the conference begins, we’ve teamed up with Bocoup to hold beginner and advanced training classes on Wednesday, June 12, for which separate tickets (and similar membership discounts) are available.

Sponsors

We’re happy to have the support of the sponsors who have already joined us to help bring jQuery Portland to life, including Splunk, Intel, AppNexus, Automattic, Infragistics, Act-On Software, and Bocoup.

There are still ways to get involved in making jQuery Portland even better, so take a look at our prospectus and get in touch if you (or your company) are interested.

See You There?

We’re really excited about the way jQuery Portland is shaping up and believe that there’s a little bit of something for everyone. (Everyone who reads the jQuery blog, that is!) Follow @jqcon on Twitter for more updates, and hopefully, we’ll see you in a month!

jQuery Conference is back and better than ever! We’re excited to invite you to the City of Roses—Portland, Oregon on June 13 and 14, 2013 at the Oregon Convention Center. We’ve got more room (and lead time) than ever before, so if you haven’t been able to make it to a jQuery Conference in the past, this is your best opportunity yet!

We’re returning to our traditional two-track lineup, which means there’ll be lots to learn and even more chances to speak. Early-bird registration is open right now, but we only have a limited number of slots, so you definitely want to act fast.

Call For Papers

A conference is nothing without a great lineup of speakers sharing their experience, knowledge, and tools with the community. Whether you’re a regular on the conference circuit or you’ve always considered speaking but haven’t yet, we’re eager to hear from you. Our Call for Papers will be open from now through March 2nd, which gives you a month and a half (at most) to prepare your proposal. We’re also continuing our “inverted” proposal process, so if there’s someone you really want to hear from, let us know.

Training Day

If you’re looking for a bit more than the regular conference experience, perhaps a more focused opportunity to grow as a developer, we’ve partnered with Bocoup to host a two-track training day the day before the conference  (June 12). With both Front End Fundamentals and Advanced jQuery courses available, it’s a great way to make the most of your trip.

Sponsors

Sponsoring a jQuery Conference is a great way to build your company profile in the jQuery community; your best opportunity to meet (and hopefully hire) top jQuery developers, evangelize your products, and help support the jQuery Foundation. We’re still looking for partners to work with us on the largest jQuery event yet, so take a look at our prospectus and get in touch to get the ball rolling.

That’s it for now; stay tuned to the blog and @jqcon for announcements about speakers, parties and all other manner of conference goodness. We’ll see you there!

With much of the East Coast bracing for the impact of Hurricane Sandy, now’s certainly a good time to take a look back on some sunnier times. Two weeks ago today, the jQuery Foundation held the first-ever jQuery Developer Summit at the Aol Campus in Dulles, Va. After a brief morning overview of our major tools and processes, over 120 team and community members set to work on nearly every aspect of our projects. We divided into 18 teams and focused on everything from triaging and fixing bugs and documentation for jQuery Core, UI, and Mobile, to working on design, implementation and deployment of our entire network of sites, to improving our automated testing and gathering and analysis of metrics on how people use our libraries and websites.

In addition to closing (and opening) hundreds of issues and tickets, and making hundreds of commits to repositories across our entire organization, it seemed that everyone in attendance, from grizzled old hands to greenhorn contributors, learned a lot. We were happy to celebrate a lot of firsts, whether it was somebody’s first commit on a jQuery repository, or their first git commit, period. Of course, not everything went off without a hitch, and we’ve been gathering feedback and figuring out how we can do even better next time.

What that means, of course, is that there will be a next time!  With such an incredible energy in the room for the two days, and a new group of contributors digging in on all of our projects, we’re certainly looking forward to another go-round. Watch this space and follow @jqcon for updates on the Developer Summit and all our other events. In the meantime, check out these recaps from Andy Couch and Carl Danley, and photos from Bowling for jQuery!

And finally, we’d like to extend a hearty thanks to each and every one of you who joined us for two days to help out and participate, we could not have done it without you! Thank you!