I started giving monthly presentations for my PHP user group, and public speaking has grown into a hobby and networking opportunity for me. I’m regularly asked to speak at local technology and business groups, and would love to visit your group to spread the word about technologies that matter to me. Contact me if you’re interested in booking an appearance.
Eye tracking has been a hot subject in the usability community lately, following the release of Jakob Nielsen’s new book. Cashing in on some of this hype, I gave an overview of eye tracking and plugged Attention Wizard, an exciting alternative to expensive eye tracking hardware.
HTML5 became a hot topic after the announcement of the iPad, and the Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup was ready to discuss the most important changes HTML5 brings to the web developer’s world.
I had to give myself a crash course in using the canvas tag for this one, but I’m glad I did. Canvas turned out to be a cool technology and I can’t wait to try it on a real site.
I discovered Mockups only a few days before our November meetup, and quickly added it to our agenda. The folks at Balsamiq even provided me a free license to raffle off. The presentation was well-received, and several members have told me how Mockups’ loose style helped them get more useful feedback from their customers.
This was a rough presentation to put together, but a lot of fun to do. It’s hard to make this much information compelling, but I got through it in an hour with a lot of jokes and some great input from the group at the Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Dev Meetup. The presentation covers three ways to optimize each layer of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, but let me give you the executive summary: RAM is cheap! In fact, many of the optimizations in here are ways to get the server’s software to utilize all the RAM available to it for better performance.
I’ve become almost an evangelist for Cufon, an exciting Javascript library which brings rich typography to the web. I’ve done this presentation for my PHP meetup and even held a workshop on it at work, and the reception was amazing. Who can blame designers for being excited about the possibilities of scalable vector typography, and using their favorite fonts on web sites with abandon?
My most popular presentation was written for the April, 2009 Fox Valley Computing Professionals meeting, followed by an encore at their May meeting. In June, the FVCP gang was invited to discuss social media at the OMNI User Group in Oakbrook Terrace. My slide deck has over 1,000 views on Slideshare.com, and was featured on their front page for three days. This 30-minute presentation covers the basics of Facebook, and gives examples of how companies are using social networks to build relationships with their customers.
Lint is a classic tool for software developers, and its continued use attests to the value of static code analysis. This presentation covers tools for Lint checking PHP and Javascript code, and a link to an excellent presentation by the author of jsLint.
The Firebug extension for Firefox has made it easy for me to debug CSS layouts and Javascript code. This presentation from the July, 2009 PHP meetup started with my slideshow, followed by a half hour live walkthrough showing Firebug’s major features. Then, I showed FireQuery briefly before handing over the reigns to another presenter covering FirePHP.
This is a presentation I put together for the West Suburban Chicago PHP Meetup. It covers XDebug & “callgrind” utilities for PHP profiling, and Firebug’s excellent profiler for Javascript.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I write web applications, and I've made a career out of what I love for ten years. I'm also a cat shelter volunteer, an exercise walker, an avid Scrabble player, a vintage computer enthusiast, a Doctor Who and Star Trek fan, and a b-movie junkie. Somehow, I find time to write some fairly popular WordPress plugins and run the Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup.
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