January 2010 Chicago JavaScript Meetup: I had a great time

So I had been meaning to go to a (relatively) local JavaScript Meetup for several months, but it always seemed to be scheduled when I was on a business trip, out of town on vacation, or some other event that I needed to be at. But on January 28th, 2010 I was able to attend. The format was supposed to be a few lightning presentations (10-15 minutes) followed by a more in-depth presentation. Unfortunately the person that was supposed to give the longer presentation on MongoDB (a built for scale database that uses JSON like structures to store data) wasn't able to make it so one of the event organizers (Zishan Ahmad) stepped up and gave a quick overview from some links provided by the original presenter.

I especially liked the quick presentation done by Jason Huggins on Node.js. It wasn't a dive dive by any means, nor was it meant to be, but I had heard about Node.js a while ago, and never really took the time to look at it. I could tell that Jason was pretty excited about Node.js and because of that excitement I have since read up a bit more on it. While it is focused on being a Server side implementation of JavaScript, it can be used to perform local processing as well from its own console application. I'm thinking about finding a fun little project to explore what Node.js has to offer.