Greg and I flew to San Francisco last week for the Meteor Devshop 11. I drank a lot of cucumber water, and talked a lot of Meteor. This was a great day well spent, meeting folks in the community and helping out with Q&A. I spent most of the day quickly releasing my static pages package. I won't go into the talks because you can watch the entire thing for yourself.

If you're an aural learner as opposed to a visual one, download Meteor Podcast 5 which covers these same topics and more!

Just know that during the evening portion, Greg and I gave the GREATEST 3-MINUTE TALK EVER. Check it out for yourself at the 1h:59m mark.

Meteor 1.0

The hot topic in the room was the upcoming release of Meteor 1.0. The two main areas of work soon to be completed are Meteor UI (now codenamed Blaze, because Blaze comes after Spark, GET IT?) and the new packaging system integrating meteorite and powering Atmosphere 2.

Speaking of Atmosphere 2, we got a lightning talk sneak preview of screens from the guys (Percolate Studio) working on the front-end for the new Atmosphere. The new site focuses on discovery using metrics such as Github stars and installs. If they can complete everything they plan on, Atmosphere will put all other package repository websites to shame.

Oh, and oplog is coming along well.

Testing

Testing was also a big topic, and it seemed as if everyone I asked who was doing testing was doing something different. Some were using Laika, some were using Mocha. Some were using RTD, but different portions of RTD. Some had cobbled together testing flows with CasperJS. By the way, did you know Meteor has a built-in testing framework called TinyTest?) Everyone agreed that testing was painful, was very important, and no one good solution existed currently.

Shameless plug: Pre-order your Testing With Meteor book now!

I believe that rather than coming from Meteor itself, the best testing strategy will evolve from within the community and become a de facto standard. But that takes time and maturity. It ain't called the bleeding edge for nothin'!

...The Rest

The Meteor blog has a great writeup of Devshop 11 in general. And in case you don't want to comb thru the 2+ hours of Devshop video, they've conveniently put together links to all the individual talks. If you're in the area, I highly recommend attending a Devshop. Get your hardest Meteor questions answered, learn about the Meteor roadmap, cool projects, and eat some snacks!