So today the Ext JS guys posted about their conference in April. We use Ext JS at work and I have become pretty competent in using the framework for UI design. A lot of the things that they are adding in Ext JS 3.0 will make the toolkit more compelling. The most significant of all will be the accessibility changes and the addition of Ext Core as a standalone library.

Anyway, with that in mind I asked my boss if I could go and it was decided that I am going! I am very excited! This is the first conference I have gone to and I think it will be a good one. The talks that I am looking forward to the most are the Keynote with Douglas Crockford, Ext 3.x – What’s new & how to use it, Introducing Ext Core, Building Accessible Apps for Ext JS and Ext GWT, Refactoring, Application Deployment, Building Usable Interfaces, Optimizing Performance, and Critical Developer Tools.

That may seem like a lot to be excited about to you, but I am quite stoked. By my reckoning that’s %33 Ext talks and %66 general javascript (or more general) programming talks, which is quite acceptable to me.

I also think it’s pretty Cool that they give you a discount based on how long you have had a login for the forum and how many posts you have made to the forum. I got a 25% discount based 200 posts and five months of participation. That really is an interesting way to foster community.

When I do end up going to the conference I will do my best to distill the talks into written word

A lot of people thought that I was crazy to try to take nine hours in the first half of the summer. I even admit that in retrospect it was probably not the best idea in the world. But I do think that it was helpful in a number of areas.

The most obvious area that I benefited in is the fact that in my senior year I will only need to take twelve hours a semester. This relaxing of hours near the end was the primary reason that I did this.

The second area that this really helped in was my overall motivation. I had to marshal extreme motivation to get all the work done that I needed to get done. If it were not for what I did this summer I doubt that I would ever be able to telecommute, but this just proves that I can do it.

The third area that this amount of work helped with was the fact that I can now multitask and plan better than I have ever been able to in my life. Four papers, two tests, more than 100 pages of reading, and numerous minor assignments? No problem.

Fourth, I would say that one skill that has seriously increased due to my classes this summer has been that of my writing skills. I still do not think that I am a good writer, but I have a much better method of proof-reading and a better feel for structure. The structure applies both to sentences and to entire papers.

Lastly, this extreme amount of concentration, devotion, and focus has really helped me to better appreciate the time that I have. Now that all of that is done I am so glad that I get to work on some of the other things that I want to do. For instance, this blog, or the seven books that I am reading, or the program I am working on, delish.

I would not recommend just anyone to taking this amount of classes, but if you really want to be stretched, this amount of work will certainly do it.