Talking RequireJS at TakeOff Conf

So this week I attended my first conference outside of the UK and travelled to a freezing Lille, in Northern France (it's been below freezing every day!) and spoke on RequireJS, something I have written about before.

In the future I will be doing a screencast on RequireJS in detail but for now I wanted to post up the slides and talk about the talk a little. You can view my slides on SpeakerDeck.

The main thing I said in my talk with RequireJS that I wanted to reiterate is that when you first start it, you'll probably get frustrated. I know I did. The tipping point for me was when I figured out how to shim. When you first use Require it's tempting to just ditch it when you encounter a non-AMD compliant library (such as Underscore), but shimming it is so simple:

require.config({ shim: { 'lib/underscore': { 'exports': '_' } } });

Something @mheap pointed out to me that once you have an optimised JS file, you can swap out the RequireJS source for Almond, a much more minimal AMD API that you can include into your build file - check the Github link for instructions on how to use.

I'm a huge fan of RequireJS and it's now very rare that I start a new JS project without utilising it.