Meet.js Lublin and the Gamepad API

I had the pleasure of visiting my home town and speaking at the local meet.js Lublin meetup - on September 3rd I gave a talk about the Gamepad API.

The meetup took place in an oldschool-looking pub called Klubokawiarnia Komitet. I expected to see around 30-40 people, but I think it ended up closer to 60, which is quite impressive as it was just the second meet.js meetup in Lublin. There were drinks, beer and snacks, we had a few projectors at the place (karaoke style) so everybody in the room could see the slides. Kudos to the organizers, the BLStream people for taking care of everything, they really did a great job!

First on stage was Ernest Nowacki with his talk about ES6 in Angular apps, then Damian Wielgosik talked about the future of JavaScript. I talked about the Gamepad API, and my slides are here. When preparing the slide deck I decided to finish my long-forgotten article about the Gamepad API that uses the Hungry Fridge game as a case study and is now available on MDN. I also built a simple demo based on the full version of the game that showcases the use of the API, and merged all my knowledge into the Gamepad API Content Kit that is available on GitHub. It was nice to summarize it all together with the talk.

I hope people enjoyed it, though I realize they were mostly front-end developers. Still, it was an interesting experience to try and spark a little interest in HTML5 games controlled by gamepad.

I also gave away my last copy of the book HTML5 Game Development Insights with my chapter about… yes, the Gamepad API. I did a small contest at the end of the talk to give it away as a prize and asked which edition of the js13kGames competition is held this year. The book is also available on Amazon if anyone would like to buy it.