I attended the JSChannel Bangalore conference last month http://2014.jschannel.com/#/ and got the chance to hear Douglas Crockford. Some information about him :
He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He also discovered the JSON Data Interchange Format, the world's most loved data format. And he works at Paypal. Basically, he's the inventor of JSON format the widely used format now.
My learnings from his talk are:
- JSON pronunciation: it's pronounced a J-SAUN and not JASON :)
- The other important point he did mention is to use good features of programming language. Sometimes as programmers, we use features that are not commonly used to flash our programming capabilities. But while designing software we should understand that how well this feature is supported in the future.
- Next take away is to pick right tools for the right problem
- The computer world is bombarded with new technologies coming regularly. So, for learning you can pick anything. But, for adopting into production evaluate it on various fronts, like memory consumption, community support, future releases
I hope it's useful.