Geekmeet Stockholm – Performance and Play
I am just getting ready for my second day in Stockholm, Sweden to go to the bwin offices and talk about professional web development and the change of JavaScript. The professional thing is going to be interesting as I am still feeling the beers of the GeekMeet yesterday night.
Talking of GeekMeet, except for the interesting choice of advertising keywords showing up when you look for it, it was a roaring success and if I had a hat it’d be off to the organizers at Creuna and Robert Nyman for pulling this out of their hats (ok, you killed that metaphor, now let it die in peace).
Over 150 geeks came to drink beer and pizza and had to wait for those by listening to my drivel about website performance and ethical hacking. Some seemed to have been inspired by it, so that’s good I guess.
What I have to say to the credit of the Swedish audience is that they have a great sense of humour and are very happy to get distracted by unexpected slides and side-stories. It was great fun presenting and chatting to people afterward.
Credit must also go to Robert Nyman for not being only a masterly “one, two” announcer but also finding a very nice way to introduce myself – playing hangman with my name using all the emails and messages I sent him over the years telling him off for doing things wrong. Thanks for making me sound like a picky bastard, but I understand that it came from the heart. I also explained that my connection with PPK started the same way – but with him being the picky one.
My first presentation revolved around things you can do to speed up your web sites, unashamedly based on the work done by Steve Souders, Nicole Sullivan, Stoyan Stefanov, Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville. You can get the slides on slideshare:
The second presentation was (re)introducing the concept of ethical hacking and an invitation for people to see the web as their playground using cURL and GreaseMonkey to remix and improve it:
Playing With The Web
My second talk at geekmeet sweden talking about the tools you can use to hack and remix the web.
All in all I had a wonderful time and I was impressed how easy it was for me to deliver all of this in such a short amount of time (I just gave seven presentations and two interviews in three days in two countries, having written the presentations on airports and flights in between).
Sweden rocks! Now I am off to check out the ice bar in the hotel and tomorrow it is back to England.
Tags: curl, ethicalhacking, geekmeet, geekmeetse, geekmeetsthlm, greasemonkey, performance, stockholm, sweden
December 5th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Your presentations were entertaining.
And so were the talks around the beers afterward.
December 6th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Thanks a lot for your great presentations and your kind words! :-)
December 6th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Thank you for your presentations at our office, I think the performance presentation was an eye-opener for a lot of traditional back-end developers.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Hi
I was there but never had a chance to thank you, great inspiring words.
I have a question that you might be able to answer. You talked some about have large images instead of many and using image sprites. Have you any thought on using base64 converted imges directly in html or in css. What are the pros/cons with this approach? I wrote recently about it but would love to hear your opinion on it.
http://jedisthlm.com/2008/12/03/urldataimagejpgbase64/
Thanks again for a great talk at GeekMeet.
December 6th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
You were awesome! Thanks alot for taking time to come out.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:23 am
@jens, our performance people are investigating this, too. In so many cases, though it is IE6 that throws a spanner in the works there again as it doesn’t support base64. So you’d have to fork for browsers and then have an MHTML version for ie6. MHTML is the mime-encoded version of HTML used in older Outlook versions which allows for embedding, but also means the resulting file is massive. We’ll do some testing on it, but I get the feeling it is going to be too complex to be really a gain.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Thanks for your great talks! I was really inspired, and it was a lot of fun to listen to you!
December 7th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
@Chris, sounds great to hear.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Thanks, the presentations was really good and I totally agree with Mr Hising, a real eye-opener. Also thanks Yahoo for the Pipes, we are starting using it now and its really powerful.
Hope to see you in London 2009 at the @Media conference.
Cheers
December 17th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Great talks, Chris! Thanks, Chris PS: My coverage of it here: http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/geek-meet-stockholm-with-chris-heilmann-of-yahoo/