Yesterday I was one of the speakers at Paris Web and my talk was “Working in the now”:

Working In The Now - Paris Web

My presentation covering several ways how you can use nowaday's free web offers to save money and time for your company and thus securing your job.

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Originally I meant to talk about HTML5 goodies and how to simulate them with Flash and DHTML right now (writing a small abstraction library) but seeing the latest rounds of crashes and layoffs I changed my stance and talked about things that we could be doing now to both secure our jobs and not lose all the momentum the standards movement got in the last few years.

I’ve explained the reasons and my thoughts on the subject in detail in another post here. In the talk I advocated re-using components and systems we already have to work faster, deliver better and have less hardware and software overhead in doing so.

These are:

• Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
• CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
• Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
• Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
• Page widgets (things that HTML doesn’t have): YUI, jQuery UI
• Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
• YouTube API
• Amazon S3 for storage
• Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
• Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
• Mechanical Turk

The feedback so far was great, but there was also a lot of “yeah this is open source, but what if the company running it goes down and how can I trust it” questions. I will write something longer abut this soon, it is just very interesting to see that there is a big problem with free things and trust.

I just delivered my talk on teaching, learning and writing JavaScript for use. The slides are available on slideshare below and if you don’t want to sign up, I’ve also put them up on S3.

The art and pain of teaching JavaScript

My slides for the head conference 2008 explaining how hard it is to write JavaScript solutions that cater for all the users out there and what can be done to avoid us creating a lot of material that is outdated as soon as it comes out.

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I’ve covered the different types of JavaScript consumers: Users, Tinkerers (explaining that there is nothing derogative about this term), Implementers and Developers. I then started to explain where these people come from, what they expect and how we can reach them.

Other topics where how to battle successful but outdated information, ideas how to keep systems upgradeable and generally to consider moving away from an “OMG Ponies! Technology! Let me show you what I can do” to a “Here’s why I love using this and this is how I did it” approach.

Hopefully I inspired some people. I thoroughly enjoyed the session, although it is weird to talk to a monitor :)

The lovely people (check the interview to see what I mean) at Bachelor ICT just released “the videos of my talk about Maintainable JavaScript”http://www.bachelor-ict.nl/christian-heilmann at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam:

Here’s part one of the talk:

Chris Heilmann: Maintainable JavaScript, part 1 from Bachelor-ict.nl on Vimeo.

And Part 2:

Christian Heilmann: Maintainable JavaScript, part 2 from Bachelor-ict.nl on Vimeo.

They also interviewed me after the talk to re-iterate some of the points:

Christian Heilmann: Maintainable JavaScript from Bachelor-ict.nl on Vimeo.

Great job guys, thank you!

You can find the slides of the talk at slideshare.

I just came back from the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. I was part of a panel on JavaScript and gave this talk about using JavaScript in large and distributed teams. There’ll be a video available soon, and I will also do a more in-depth report. For now, here are the talk slides:

Scripting Maintainability

My presentation for the Fronteers conference in September 2008 in Amsterdam.

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Here’s a presentation I have given today at the Guardian office in London. In it I am covering the different great ideas I found out about developing web sites. Check the presentation here:

Creating Happy Little Websites

A brown bag presentation I gave at the Guardian in London, England to explain some of the reasons and best practices that should be applied to successful web development.

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Watch "Creating Happy Little Websites" right here, right now

The Guardian have recorded my talk and will release it on the Inside Guardian blog