Atwood's Law says that "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." One would be hard-pressed to think of any prediction of the future of software development that has been more accurate than this. But better yet, the "applications" that we are writing in JavaScript are no longer limited to just software running on general purpose computing devices! There's a growing army of do-it-yourself electronics out there, from Raspberry Pi to Arduino, SparkCore and Tessel, and many many others. And with this multitude of hardware and platform advances, Atwood's law is proving itself to be true yet again.

Thanks the ingenuity of people like Rick Waldron and his Johnny-Five framework for NodeJS, and now the Tessel platform from Technical Humans, we have robots that run on JavaScript. Yes, ROBOTS THAT RUN ON JAVASCRIPT! Johnny-Five Is Alive! But, unlike the 1986 hollywood robot from which the Johnny-Five framework gets its name, no robots will be struck by lightning or gain artificial intelligence in this presentation.

What you'll see, instead, is a guy with a little bit of electronics knowledge, a willingness to plug wires and components in to batteries and circuit boards, and an empty wallet from buying far too many Arduino toys. So, come see what the electro-mechanical-buzz is all about. Watch Derick (accidentally?) fry some electronics components, and see some JavaScript powered robots. Come for the robots, stay for the accidental birth of SkyNet from a misplaced "this" in a JavaScript callback!