mitcho.com » Boston

Spring is for Speaking: JSConf, WordCamp SF, IACL

mitcho — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:37:04 +0000

I recently confirmed three different very exciting speaking gigs which I’ll be doing this spring:

JSConf.us:

I’ll be putting my Mozilla Jetpack Ambassador hat on to represent Mozilla Labs’ Jetpack project at the premier Javascript conference in North America, JSConf.us, which this year will be April 17-18 in Washington D.C. and has a pirate theme.¹ I’ll be giving a short talk in the main session and will also lead a hands-on Jetpack workshop in the hacker lounge. I’ve heard that JSConf is a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to it!

WordCamp San Francisco:

I’m honored to have been invited to give a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2010. WordCamps are community-organized events for the WordPress community, and the San Francisco WordCamp is the original and biggest. WordCamp SF will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center on May 1st. Tickets available.

My talk is tentatively titled “Abstract Your Code.”² WordPress is a great platform to build amazing content-rich applications on, and many of us have written new functionality in the form of plugins. I hope to encourage developers to make their code more portable and reusable after the project is done—or, ideally, to even start with abstraction in mind—to add to the “life” of the code and to consider then open-sourcing that functionality.

Hope to see you there!

International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) 18:

Finally, I’m thrilled to say that I got a paper accepted to the annual meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics which this year is at Harvard on May 20-22. IACL is the big conference for Chinese linguistics, with about 180 papers presenting. I’ll be presenting Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese, my recent work on the formal syntax/semantics of two only words in Chinese: zhǐ (只) and éryǐ (而已). I’ve put up a handout of some of this material in work-in-progress form which I recently presented at SNEWS.

I’ll fit right in. ↩
Sexier title suggestions welcome. ↩

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Jetpacking in Boston

mitcho — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:19:06 +0000

A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at the Boston Javascript meetup introducing Jetpack and filling people in in the latest developments in the project, including the Reboot. Between 20 to 30 people came to the talk which was at Microsoft Cambridge. Here are the slides from the talk:¹

Extend the Browser with Jetpack

I felt the audience was very engaged and we had almost a dozen questions in the question period and throughout. Most of the examples centered around the use of capabilities and the new security model. For example:

What level of granularity will the manifests have? Do you have to just say “I use xhr” or “I talk to twitter but not facebook”?
What will be the review process for capabilities?
What license will capabilities use?

Perhaps I simply did not present this material in the clearest manner (it didn’t help that I didn’t have any particular slides covering the capability and manifest model) but it also reflects the reality that these particulars of the manifests’ security sections are still being fleshed out. I’m looking forward to the next time I speak on Jetpack when hopefully the discussion of the Reboot will be more concrete and I’ll be able to give a clearer overview and demo of these aspects of the Reboot.

If anyone would like the Keynote deck, just let me know. ↩

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WordCamp Boston 2010

mitcho — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:02:01 +0000

This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.

(I invite you to also check out more photos below as well as my full WordCamp gallery.)

My first talk was “Getting Into The Loop,” which gives a quick taste of The Loop which is a central programming construct in every WordPress application. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

My second talk was an Ignite talk on the importance of beta testing plugins. Ignite talks are five minute lightning talks with 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

The videos for both talks will ultimately go up on wordpress.tv.

The event was a huge success and I’m looking forward to help organize WordCamp Boston 2011 as well!

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Presenting in Boston at SIGIR Workshop

mitcho — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:10:25 +0000

I have been accepted to present a short paper entitled “Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface” at the ACM SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World in Boston on July 23rd. I’ll probably be there in Boston a few days before or after as well in order to find an apartment for the fall. If anyone is in Boston at that time and would like to meet up, or if you’re near Cambridge and looking for an apartment-mate, please let me know.

If you would like to see a preprint of the paper, please contact me at x@x.com where x=mitcho.

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