speakers.html

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title: Speakers
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        <a name="linda"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/lsandvik.jpg" alt="Linda Sandvik" />
        
        <h1>Linda Sandvik</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Linda is a interface developer, wannabe MacGyver and adventurer. She's a nomad but is currently living in Hackney (London) and learning UX design at Last.fm (she likes learning new things).</p>
            <p>She is a technology resident at Spike Island art gallery, and recently discovered tinkering with electronics. She has made stuff like a laser harp, burping trashcans and an arcade style cycling game with actual bicycles as the controllers. She is obsessed with facilitating creativity &amp; learning, and making interactive installations that bridges the physical and digital.</p>
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        <h2>Making things better</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>How do we become better interface developers? How do we find better problems to solve?</p>
            <p>The most interesting work lies outside of your comfort zone. So how can you get there? This is a sort of crash course in stepping out of your comfort zone, trying new things, learning to learn and creating your own luck.</p>
            <p>How should we do research &amp; development? To be innovative, we must create a culture that tolerates failure. But who wants to fail? And certainly not admit to it. I want to share with you some of my failures. We're taught to do things the right way. But to discover something that other people haven't, one needs to do things the wrong way.</p>
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        <a name="ian"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="img/ibarber.jpg" alt="Ian Barber" />
        
        <h1>Ian Barber</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Ian Barber works as a Senior Developer Advocate for Google+, and is based in Google's London office. Ian has been developing and managing development teams professionally since 2002. Among various open source interests, Ian is the author of the PHP Support Vector Machine extension and a contributor to the brokerless messaging library ZeroMQ. He blogs at <a href="http://phpir.com">http://phpir.com</a> and <a href="http://www.riskcompletefailure.com">http://www.riskcompletefailure.com</a>.</p>
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        <h2>How Google Builds Webservices</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>We've been building web services for many years at Google, and over the years our approach to them has evolved. In this talk we will look at some of the lessons learned and how they are embodied in the latest generation of our API service, and why developer experience matters both outside and inside of a team. This talk should be helpful for anyone considering or developing web services for the wider development community.</p>
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        <a name="ross"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/rtuck.jpg" alt="Ross Tuck" />
        
        <h1>Ross Tuck</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Ross Tuck is a senior developer and team lead at Ibuildings in the Netherlands, despite being American. He's currently obsessed with hypermedia, CQRS and vector graphics but this tends to change quickly. Otherwise, he's usually trying to make time to read.</p>
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        <h2>HTTP and Your Angry Dog</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>What is an etag, exactly? What's all that stuff in the Accept header? And what the heck does a Vary header do anyways?! Web developers use HTTP everyday but most of us don't know how to get the most out of it. This talk goes past memorizing status codes (although we'll see those too) and teaches how to get the most out of every request and response.</p>
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    <div class="speaker yellow clearfix">
        <a name="david"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/dzuelke.jpg" alt="David Zuelke" />
        
        <h1>David Zuelke</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>David Zuelke works as the Lead Architect at EMH Technologies, the technical incubator of European Media Holding, in Munich, Germany. He has been developing applications on the web since long before the turn of the millennium and regularly speaks at conferences around the world about things he likes or gets to work on, such as systems architecture, REST &amp; HTTP, Hadoop &amp; Big Data, CouchDB and, of course, PHP.</p>
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        <h2>Surviving a Prime Time TV Commercial</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>Setting up an online shop is a relatively trivial task these days. Pick your application, adjust some templates, sign payment provider contracts, make sure your supply chain is in order, and launch.</p>
            <p>But once you decide to aim higher and start airing commercials, on TV, during prime time hours, then regular off-the-shelf software will not cope with the flood of incoming requests. That's when it is time to build something a little more durable, without a single point of failure, serving pages in under a hundred milliseconds, unfazed by extreme concurrency.</p>
            <p>This is a talk about lessons learned and missions accomplished.</p>
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        <a name="ade"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/ade.jpg" alt="Ade Oshineye" />
        
        <h1>Ade Oshineye</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Ade is a Senior Developer Advocate in Google's London office and works on the Google+ project. Over the last decade he's worked on trading systems for a variety of investment banks as well as on Google's advertising and mobile search systems. He's also the co-author of "Apprenticeship Patterns": a book that teaches you how to learn to be a great programmer. He's particularly interested in Developer Experience, distributed systems and the future of online news.</p>
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        <h2>Identity, responsiveness and the future of the web</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>Devices like the Chromebook Pixel (which are hi-DPI, touch-sensitive but aren't phones or tablets) show us that the future of the web is too complex for a simplistic approach to responsiveness. It's not enough to think that media queries and a few screen width breakpoints suffice to make your site future-friendly.</p>
            <p>In this talk I'm going to propose that responsiveness requires us to take into account the entire context of the user. That means everything from device orientation to bandwidth to identity.</p>
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        <a name="andy"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/andy.jpg" alt="Andy Hume" />
        
        <h1>Andy Hume</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Andy is client-side architect at the Guardian in London where he works on technical strategy across a range of digital products. With a background in client-side web development he has worked as a lead engineer on Bing Maps, and as a consultant at Clearleft for clients ranging from the BBC and Channel 4 to Mozilla and Gumtree.</p>
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        <h2>Anatomy of a responsive page load</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>With more people accessing the web on mobile devices over mobile networks, the performance of your responsive website is only becoming more important. Creating a site that appropriately loads the content and assets required to deliver a great user experience to the widest range of users is a task fraught with trade-offs and nuances. Using the Guardian's new mobile first responsive site as a case study, we'll look at how you get browsers to download content and show it on people's screens as quickly as possible.</p>
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        <a name="alan"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/alan.jpg" alt="Alan Greenblatt" />
        
        <h1>Alan Greenblatt</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Alan Greenblatt is a senior technical evangelist at Adobe.  Over the years, Alan has worked on everything from 2D &amp; 3D graphics and animation for Sun &amp; Microsoft, Semantic Data Integration for NATO &amp; Airbus and Web development for various financial and pharmaceutical companies.  These days he focuses on Web Standards and Web &amp; Mobile app development.  Now he enjoys coding, writing &amp; talking about all of the above.  You can reach Alan on Twitter at @agreenblatt or on his blog, http://blattchat.com.</p>
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        <h2>Coming Soon to a Browser Near You</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>Several exciting new Web standards in the areas of magazine-style layouts and advanced graphical and special effects are working their way through the W3C . Implementations of these advanced features are already starting to show up in various mobile and desktop browsers. We'll discuss the state of these technologies, and show you how and where you can use them right now and what to expect in the near future.</p>
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    <div class="speaker yellow">
        <a name="lorna"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/lorna.jpg" alt="Lorna Mitchell" />
        
        <h1>Lorna Mitchell</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Lorna is an independent web development consultant based in Leeds, in the north of England. She is a published author, delivers training on a variety of PHP- and API-related topics, is a regular conference speaker, and works with a variety of clients on their web development and API projects. Lorna is also an active mentor with PHPWomen, helped found the PHP North West conference, and now leads the joind.in open source project.</p>
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        <h2>Debugging HTTP</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>In this world where we have moved beyond web pages and build ever-more asynchronous applications, often things that go wrong result in errors we can't see. This session will give a very technical overview of HTTP and how to inspect your application's communications, whether on the web or on a mobile device. Using Curl, Wireshark and Charles, we can quickly and painlessly identify where the problem exists, without spending a lot of time making changes to our application to identify a problem. Whether you're debugging a backend API, an ajax request or an unexpected timeout, these are the tools you will want to have at hand.</p>
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    <div class="speaker clearfix">
        <a name="hadi"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/hadi.png" alt="Hadi Hariri" />
        
        <h1>Hadi Hariri</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Hadi Hariri is a developer, speaker and Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. His passions include software architecture and web development. Book author and frequent contributor to developer publications, Hadi has been speaking at industry events for over a decade. He is based in Spain where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is also an ASP.NET MVP and ASP.NET Insider.</p>
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        <h2>Developers: Prima Donnas of the 21st Century</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>We are developers. We are creators. We are misunderstood by customers, by managers and even co-workers, we are undervalued and often overworked. People don't appreciate the value we put in our craft and and our drive for innovation. We are central to business in the 21st century yet people don't appreciate us! " Of course you are, but you also forgot to mention: You suck at communication. You often put business at risk based on personal ambitions and waste serious amounts of time trying to improve and discuss the wrong things, all in the name of the next great thing that's going to solve it all. You've completely forgotten the plot! Don't believe me? Why don't you come along to this talk and get a wake up call. But don't expect to be treated nicely.</p>
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    <div class="speaker yellow">
        <a name="rowan"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/rowan.jpg" alt="Rowan Merewood" />
        
        <h1>Rowan Merewood</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Rowan is a software engineer and technical team lead at Inviqa. He's worked commercially with PHP for well over 6 years, and dabbling in Python, Java, and BASIC if you go back far enough. His work has encompassed everything from tiny in-page scripts through to multi-million pound billing engines using a variety of open source technologies. Rowan is based in Sheffield, UK, makes semi-regular treks over to the PHPNW user group meetings and accidentally organises the Sheffield PHP user group.</p>
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        <h2>Building Better Developers</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>Nothing stands still in this industry: new language features in your weapon of choice, nginx gaining ground on Apache, yet another standard you should be adhering to, cloud hosting services making deployment as easy as "git push"... the list goes on. What can you do to make sure that you're keeping up with all these changes without cloning yourself and only sleeping 3 hours a week?</p>
            <p>It's not just about improving your coding skill, it's understanding how to make all your abilities and those of your peers work together to keep you ahead of the game. We'll look at a combination of human hacks and hard work to help fine tune the most important machine you own.</p>
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    <div class="speaker clearfix">
        <a name="phil"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/phil.jpg" alt="Phil Leggetter" />
        
        <h1>Phil Leggetter</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Phil Leggetter is a Developer Evangelist at Pusher, a real-time web hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable real-time functionality to web and mobile apps . He’s been developing and using real-time web technologies for over 10 years. His focus is to help people use these technologies to build the next generation of interactive and engaging real-time web applications.</p>
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        <h2>Real Time Web and the Future of Client/Server Technologies</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>It’s been possible to instantly push information from a web server to a web browser for at least 10 years, but this technology has finally gone mainstream thanks to technologies like WebSockets and solutions like socket.io, Faye, SignalR and Pusher. In this sessions I'll cover the past, present and future of client/server communication technology, the realtime web and provide a number of use cases and demonstrations of how the technology is actually used today (it's not just chat and spaceship games).</p>
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    <div class="speaker yellow">
        <a name="alvaro"></a>
        
        <img class="hidden-phone" src="/img/alvaro.jpg" alt="Alvaro Videla" />
        
        <h1>Alvaro Videla</h1>
        <div class="bio">
            <p>Alvaro Videla works at VMware as Developer Advocate for Cloud Foundry. Before moving to Europe he used to work in Shanghai where he helped with building one of Germany's biggest dating websites. He co-authored the book "RabbitMQ in Action" for Manning Publishing. Some of his open source projects can be found <a href="http://github.com/videlalvaro">on Github</a>. Apart from code related stuff he likes traveling with his wife, listening/playing music and reading books. You can find him on Twitter as <a href="http://twitter.com/old_sound">@old_sound</a>.</p>
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        <h2>Scaling Applications with RabbitMQ</h2>
        <div class="abstract">
            <p>Do you need to process thousands of images in the background for your web app? Do you need to share data across multiple applications, probably written in different languages and sitting at different servers? Your real time data feed is becoming slow because you are polling the database constantly for new data updates? Do you need to scale information processing during peek times? What about deploying new features with zero downtime? If any of these problems sound familiar then you probably need to use messaging in your application.</p>
            <p>In this talk I will introduce RabbitMQ, a messaging and queue server that can help us tackle those problems. We will learn how to implement messaging into our applications, use Pub/Sub, RPC and give a new meaning to the term 'decoupling'.</p>
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