Good news everyone! Now that summer is over, there’s no more heat to complain about! That just leaves, ah yes, the bitter cold. Sure, maybe you’ve been handling it well enough so far by staying busy with holiday planning, but what happens when the New Year comes? Suddenly nobody is “Dreaming of a white…” anything, anymore.

What a great year 2013 has been! We’re feeling (collectively) like Ebenezer Scrooge in the final chapters of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – except we haven’t been jerks up ’til now and we think working at SitePen is a year-round Christmas vacation, unlike the earlier chapters wherein Scrooge forces poor Mr. Cratchit to work by the heat of a candle.

The 2012 ESRI Developer Summit is attended by 1,700 developers, half are attending for the first time and thirty percent are from international locations! Dylan continues to mingle with like-minded Dojo enthusiasts from around the world, including people from the US, Canada, UAE, Japan, England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands!  The conversations at ESRI Dev Summit are confirming what we already know – Dojo is worldwide! Yesterday, Dylan presented Top Ways Dojo Can Improve Your Mapping App to a standing room only crowd!  Using an iPad, iPhone and MacBook Pro to present the talk and demo, Dylan was able to accurately showcase the cross-platform open web capabilities of Dojo.   We’ve posted the presentation and encourage you to take a look. SitePen will answer any questions you have about Dojo and mapping.  Contact us to learn more.

Dylan arrived in Palm Springs on Saturday with hundreds of other ESRI Partners just in time to participate in the Jim Christoffersen Golf Classic.  The four-player shamble event took place on the south course at the Indian Canyons Golf Resort.  Dylan had the honor of golfing with the founder of ESRI Japan, Chiharu Masaki, and meeting many ESRI partners from around the world.  The five hour event was enjoyed in the almost perfect Palm Springs weather, and Dylan reports that his golf game “wasn’t that bad”.

Most 2012 trend lists include 12 trends. (Get it?  12 in ’12.  Of course you do.).

Do you want to learn in depth details to create web applications with Dojo and Dijit? Join us in Seattle on November 16th for our 2-day Dojo Skills workshop. Dojo Skills emphasizes some of the unique advantages Dojo offers in cross-browser charts and user interface widgets through a powerful development model.

Join us for our introductory jUMP into Dojo (1 day) or our Dojo Skills (2 days) workshop – or both!- on November 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Oh, and when you register by October 14th, you will receive a FREE SitePen Mini-Boost Support plan – a $300 value! jUMP into Dojo is the best starting point for any developer wanting to learn about Dojo, Ajax and Rich Internet Application development.  Attendees will receive a rapid introduction to the capabilities of Dojo as well as the experience in applying them to solve real-world problems.

SitePen and uxebu are pleased to announce their first joint Dojo workshop in Munich, Germany. Come join some of the co-creators of Dojo on the 7th and 8th of May, 2009 to learn how to build great web sites and applications with Dojo.

Performing frequent training courses has given SitePen a chance to learn new ways to improve our training approach. Some concepts in JavaScript can be trickier than others and as we interact with the classes, we’re able to develop fun explanations for these tricky concepts.

With the recent launch of Dojo 0.9 and the planned launch of 1.0 in late October, the SitePen Dojo training courses have been revamped and now focus exclusively on the new code base. SitePen’s partnership with UK-based Skills Matter is allowing us to offer our 3-day Dojo training workshop overseas, several times, in the upcoming months.

We’re speaking at and/or attending a number of upcoming events and conferences. We hope to see you there! May 20-23: Alex will be attending the IEEE Privacy and Security Symposium in Oakland, CA.

In the past two or so months that I’ve been an employee of SitePen, my main task has been to design and write the materials for the majority of our new training course offering’s including slides, activity handouts, working code equivalents, slide design (which in the end Torrey did, a brilliant job too), and other branding aspects. On top of that, I’ve had to design these materials in such a way as to allow any of the SitePen instructors to create a specific course in a minimum amount of time with the ability to cherry-pick among various topics all to give our clientele the best learning experience possible.