I've already helloed into the box about this, but I am still sort of having some issues getting over it. Hlysht, Texas Javascript was amazing. Pretty much everything I saw was just crazy awesome. I learned things, which was a problem I had with most of the technical talks I went to at SXSWi (note that sx didn't inspire me to come back and drool about it on my stupid never-updated blog). There was exactly one talk that didn't teach me something new or make an argument I hadn't heard before, and even that would have been mind-blowing if I hadn't been working on the specific project I've been working on for the past year. I wish I could do this shit every weekend.
My favorite talks were Crockford's, John Resig's, Nicole Sullivan's, and Paul Irish's. I'd link to them, but as far as I know they're not online yet.. I plan to link to them, though, because I want to revisit every single one of them (and most of the others, honestly).
It really never occurred to me until yesterday how jaded I am about what I do. It's like I left my brain back in the 90s, when front end development was something dirty and every other kind of developer thought you were a moron if you messed around with webpages (something I still contend is bullshit, because it's a lot easier just getting something to compile and run on a server that's completely under your control than to build applications that have to work in places you've never even imagined out of what in the past amounted to packing peanuts and duct tape). While I've been walking around with a giant chip on my shoulder after having been talked down to one too many times, Javascript has been transforming into something thoroughly badass. I've been aware of this, but never actually noticed, if that makes any sense. Even if the frontend still doesn't get the respect it deserves in certain circles, um, we have geniuses.
The one thing I regret about yesterday was not trying to talk to more of those geniuses. For reasons I can't really explain, I was completely terrified of them, even though the ones I did manage to speak to were totally nice and awesome. Ok, that's not 100% true, as I was rude (stupidity, not malice) to one of the speakers and pissed him off. So two regrets, the other being that I didn't go to any of the server side Javascript talks. I got my ass schooled at the Driskell and am now finally convinced that this is something I should find a way to implement as soon as possible.
A final to-do item is to try and contribute some of the plugins and fixes I've made for my own use to the open source projects they correspond to. I feel like there's another world where the Javascript is more exciting by orders of magnitude, and it's kind of chickenshit to hang out around the perimeter implementing things other people have written instead of trying to actually participate. On the whole, I feel genuinely inspired in a way I haven't since I started doing layouts with CSS instead of tables. There's some really cool shit going on and I can't believe I'm just now realizing it.