&yet

One of the most talked about presentations at RealtimeConf 2013 was yeti Lance Stout and Philipp Hancke's demonstration of WebRTC signaling over XMPP, resulting in a federated video call within the browser.

This demo caught the attention of The VoIP Users Conference, or VUC a weekly, live discussion about all the telephony things, which began in 2007. Lance and Philipp will be joining the VUC community on December 27 at noon (Eastern Time) to discuss the potential of WebRTC as an interoperable tool to communicate within established protocols.

Philipp and Lance have been working together for some time on projects (strophe.jingle and Stanza.io, respectively) that push forward the ability of developers to utilize XMPP in tandem with the web, specifically WebRTC.

Join their conversation two weeks from today on Friday, December 27, at the VoIPUsersConference.org, or track it on their Google+ community.

At &yet, we give Thanksgiving bonuses. The tradition has become something outward-focused.

Software developers hold an exceptionally privileged place in society. We feel not guilty, but grateful for this—yet we fervently believe to whom much has been given, much is required.

Last year, the thrust of our Thanksgiving bonus was providing each of our team one day of paid time off per month to donate to making the world a better place, with us matching any gifts toward that organization.

This year, we have several Thanksgiving announcements:

Next week, yetis Adam Baldwin and Luke Karrys will be traveling to San Francisco to speak at the second Node Summit, December 3-4. Node Summit brings together developers, leaders, and other technologists to discuss Node.js and its role in the future of the web and computing.

Adam will be there representing both ^Lift Security, and The Node Security Project, an ambitious open-source project he founded with the goal of auditing every single module in npm. Adam will be discussing Node.js security with Bert Belder of StrongLoop, Charlie Robbins of Nodejitsu, and Daniel Shaw of The Node Firm.

Luke will be speaking during NodeTalks on client solutions with Glenn Scott, of the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and they'll discuss the challenges they faced on a recent project involving two different development teams coming together for the creation and deployment of a production node app and API to Microsoft Azure.

The Node Security Project is also a sponsor of Node Summit, so if you're interested in attending, use the discount code SPEAKERFNF to get a 25% discount to the event, and while you're there swing by NSP's booth and grab a sticker. Tickets are available at NodeSummit.com.

I’m gonna wax philosophic for a moment.

I’m sure you’ve heard the joke that the code you wrote six months ago is always terrible code. It’s a feeling we all share I’m sure.

Here's the thing: It’s not totally true, and the reason it's not true is choice.

When you are writing software you are perpetually making choices. Now, choice is a funny thing because we as humans cannot know the future. We are bound in time. The consequences of our choices are closed to us, as well or ill-informed as we happen to be it doesn’t matter.

This year's RealtimeConf was the most complex and ambitious thing I've ever been part of. At final count, we had 400 people involved in the making of the event. (What's quite humorous is we had 200 attendees, and 100 of those included among the contributors.)

Taking into account our staff expenses, we "only" lost $230,000 putting on RealtimeConf. We had several members of our team focused mostly full-time on the event for over six months. If our team worked for free, we would have still lost around $50,000. (Incidentally, we are very grateful to our very generous "tip jar" contributors.)

The assumption most people have made (and most certainly will make based on the above) is that we've decided not to reprise the conference because we overextended ourselves and lost too much money.

Yes, it was a ton of work—but the large ensemble involved truly loved doing it and I believe the vast majority would gladly do it again. Now, it was a bit of an intense time for me because I'd also committed to speaking at JSConf EU and LxJS in the month prior to the conference. But the amazing work of Mel, Amy, Mike, Jenn, Kathryn, Ben, and the rest of our team made that possible.

And Bang uses a service called Intercom for support communication and notifications. We were recently notified that Intercom was affected by a security breach of one of their database providers, MongoHQ. For the sake of transparency, we want to pass the information along to our users.

Intercom found that 1 out of the 30 databases on MongoHQ had been accessed and states:

"The data we store on MongoHQ is limited. The user records are not labeled with the customer name, product name, or domain name of the app with which they are associated. We don't store Intercom account information, passwords, billing information, or any Intercom messages or conversations, on MongoHQ."

More detail on the breach is provided by Intercom on their website.

Today, yeti Henrik Joreteg, will be discussing WebRTC on the weekly podcast, The Web Ahead. The hour long show allows host Jen Simmons the opportunity to chat one on one with each week's guest on the burgeoning technologies and platforms that are pushing the web forward.

Henrik is author of the popular library, SimpleWebRTC and lead developer for Talky, a tool we built for simple video chat and screen sharing. He's also heading up the effort to push WebRTC forward at IsWebRTCReadyYet.com.

Henrik first spoke on WebRTC at JSConf Brazil and built AT&T's WebRTC focused att.js, which was showcased by AT&T at CES earlier this year. He spoke recently about WebRTC, first on a Realtime Data panel at EdgeConf this past September, and again at RealtimeConf 2013, in Portland a few weeks ago. Henrik will also be speaking at Cascadia.js later this month.

Go to 5by5's website to hear today's podcast with Henrik and Jen.

We made the RealtimeConf, in large part, to bring the Web and XMPP communities together. This year, we've seen huge strides in these two communities coming together. Most recently Lance Stout (an &yet team member), and Philipp Hancke were elected into the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) Council. This council is the five people in charge of approving extensions to XMPP. It is encouraging to see two people who have been contributing to XMPP tools for the web elected to this council.

Mike "Bear" Taylor (another &yet team member) was also re-elected to the board, which has been making the advantages of XMPP clear to developers over the years. But XMPP has always been a tough-sell for web developers.

JavaScript is ill-equipped to deal with streaming XML. Additionally, modern development tends to use language data structures (namely JSON) for APIs, databases, and protocols. As such, web developers have a difficult time dealing with XMPP, finding XML stanzas to be archaic.

Web developers are a pragmatic bunch, preferring simple interfaces rather than difficult-to-implement interfaces, regardless of additional benefits. Due to this, the XMPP community has changed their attitude and tactics. They used to try and convince web developers to use XMPP whereas now they are bringing XMPP to web developers with more web-friendly interfaces.

After years spent compiling, eight months of writing, editing and rewriting, figuring out the process for epublishing and learning how to use Gumroad (which we highly recommend!) – Human JavaScript is finally available.

As an experiment, we released it a week ago to see what the reaction would be and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Here's what people have said about Human JavaScript in the past week:

"...required reading for every JavaScript Developer." @svenlito

"Human Javascript is one of these books I would have loved to have read two years ago. Great book!" @normanrz

Inspired by a tweet from @seriouspony, we are offering a special discount scholarship ticket with the aim of increasing the number of amazing women part of the RealtimeConf community. (We already have some truly incredible women part of this community, but we'd sure love to see more.)

This ticket is just $399 for women who will commit to submitting a talk at next year's RealtimeConf.This includes admission to RealtimeConf and WebRTC Camp. (Don't miss checking out the RealtimeConf content.)

This is a savings of over $600 off the ticket price and there will be a limited number of these tickets available.

Given the significant role women have played on making our team better and that 8 of the 10 best conference talks I've heard in 2013 were delivered by women, this is an investment in the future quality of overall culture and presentations at RealtimeConf.