On Thursday we held the “Technologieplauscherl” at Netural for the first time. The “Plauscherl” (which translates to technology talk, but is unrelated to my beloved F.E.T.T.) is some sort of short evening barcamp held by the local dev community of Linz in different locations, mostly offices from attending persons. In its eight edition it had the unique topic “books”, which was also a first for the group, I guess. The goal was: Present a book and give a short review.
In short, those were the books mentioned:
- Organizer and mastermind of the Plauscherl — Phil Reither — presented Brain Rules, showing techniques for keeping your brain functional and working
- Joachim Sauer showed Liars and Outliers, very philosophical but also very interesting book on security in your everyday live, from an evolutional point of view
- Thomas Einwaller gave a short summary of “Release It!”, which showed some best practices and experiences in releasing large scale enterprise software
- And I was showing SMACSS. And if you’re into CSS, you should definitely take a look into this topic
What I found interesting is that three of the four book presenters (including myself) were from the “Silbergrau area of 2006″, which means we worked together in the past and seem to haven’t changed much since back then 
Last, but definitely not least Bernhard Wurm gave a very detailed introduction to TypeScript, Microsofts JavaScript superset which was — at a first glance — extraordinarily well designed and surprisingly open minded, with an open door towards the community and existing projects. More of a meaningful addition to your web development practices than a way of drawing attention. The support for OSX and Linux is very good and there’re even Sublime Text plugins. Tough you only get the full scale experience by having the superb IntelliSense Addon for Visual Studio. If you give me some of those for Sublime (or Coda, but that will never happen), I’m really willing to try it past those examples.
What was even more interesting was the resulting discussion among the nerds. CoffeeScript was mentioned, as was Dart with lots and lots of examples and first-hand experiences. Which showed also the main reason of this little Get-Together in our steel town: Have a look across your border and see how others handle the same problems you might stumble upon. I’m happy to participate in the next round!