They're kind, supportive and know how to focus your energy to help get a really difficult task done. They don't dictate, they don't prescribe, they listen.
Your job as a tech lead is to listen and help figure out a way to make testing, compiling, deployment, support, and escalation easier.
V8 has an odd habit of not releasing memory back to the OS after mark-and-sweeps. It's a minor performance boost to let it roll up memory and it isn't uncommon for it to hog up as much memory until a heuristic (or an OS signal) tells it to knock it off.
You can access the native objects and interact with them in javascript using Tint (essentially node.js + native-bridge + ease-of-use-wrapper). A little different then "run-in-a-webkit-with-C++-callbacks" mentality (e.g., phonegap, node-webkit), or facebook's "branded-programming" with react native.
Is this a big needed feature? It's actually really easy to pull of, cairo's backend can be switched from using images to svg, to pdf's. It's just switching the backend and once the renderer is done just spit out the results.
Add it as a feature request on github and i'll add it to the api.
Sort of, they're very similar still. In actually the layout is almost exactly the same, its the rendering and compositing that has significantly changed between the two.
Yes, there's a software rendering version, it actually uses Cairo. Software rendering just bitblts up (out of a webworker or as a SDL_UpdateRect) callback in javascript as a RGBA array.
It actually does, turn on chrome's canvas profiler its kicking up bindTextures for everything. On the demo it even says its a hardware accelerated version and requires WebGL.
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664