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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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Mashing up the browser in Maine

mitcho — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:00:32 +0000

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

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Extending WordPress talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup

mitcho — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:40:19 +0000

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup. The Boston WordPress Meetup meets monthly at the Microsoft Cambridge Research Center which is a fantastic venue right on the Charles river. Last night we got to be up on the 10th floor which has a great view of Boston right over the river. There was pretty good turnout, with about thirty or fourty people there.

My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:

Extending WordPress with (Web)Hooks

View more documents from Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine.

The talk included some live coding which is always dangerous, but it all went off without a hitch.

Kurt Eng was kind enough to get video of the talk as well which hopefully we’ll get up on wordpress.tv in the near future. Bryan also sent me a link with some photos on Flickr.

Thank you to all who attended¹ and of course to Microsoft who provided the venue and food! The Boston WordPress Meetup is a great community and I hope to keep supporting it and its activities.

For anyone who attended, I would greatly appreciate feedback on the talk at SpeakerRate. ↩

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Lecture at ITSP - 先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムにて講義

mitcho — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:05:19 +0000

Yesterday I was invited to give a lecture for students the MEXT IT Specialist Program. ITSP is a partnership between Keio, Waseda, and Chuo Universities and NTT, IBM, and Mozilla to bring advanced IT training and opportunities to their Master’s students. It was a longish time slot so I decided to split it up into two different talks: one on open source and open processes (similar to one of my sessions at the recent BarCamp Tokyo) and one on the future of interfaces, internationalization and globalization, and Ubiquity. Here are the slides for posterity. (Note: the second set of slides is mostly in Japanese.)

昨日は文部科学省の先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムの学生の為に講義をしました。ちょっと長めの時間だったので、二つのトークに分けてみました。第一部は「オープン」と言うアイデア、特にオープンなデザイン過程の利点について。第二部は未来のインターフェースと国際化とUbiquityの紹介でした。スライドをここにslideshareにあげておきました。

Design processes in the open-source era オープンソース時代のデザインプロセス

Ubiquity: Interfaces and Internationalization インターフェースと国際化

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Notes from BarCamp Tokyo 2009

mitcho — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:40:54 +0000

This past Saturday was Tokyo BarCamp 2009 at Sun’s Yoga offices. I of course gave a presentation on Ubiquity and our recent localization efforts, including Parser 2. As you can see, I signed up quickly:

CC-BY-NC iMorpheus

Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.

I also led a brief afternoon discussion on open ideas: the approach of working in the open, making the thought process and decisions public, not just the results. Here are the slides for that one:

My impetus for doing this discussion is probably clear to many—as I go back to academia this fall, I’ve been recently wondering about whether I could apply the open process used at Mozilla to my own academic work, blogging frequently about little thoughts and discoveries, even if they turn out to be wrong or dead-ends. For those who are interested, Brian Lockwood caught some of my slides and the discussion on video.

I also found a great photo from the discussion—I’m right there on the left edge.

CC-BY-SA LostInInaka

Sun’s facilities had a combination of different styles of rooms (lecture/presentation, this large seminar-style, a small-group one) which was very nice for different styles of sessions.

I really enjoyed meeting the Yokohama International School IT department folks who had an interesting presentation (video) on how they live stream their department meetings every week and try to be open and benefit from (and give back to) an ed-tech community larger than themselves. Other highlights for me included Mitch Altman’s session on hacker spaces and “hacking” of all varieties and sorts, Karamoon’s very knowledgeable longer session on security (video).

Finally it’s good to point out that my friend Kim Ahlström open-sourced his website jisho.org. You can now get that entire repository on github. He also demoed the Cereling library/wrapper for various parsers and morphological tools which his company will be open-sourcing in the future. Happy hacking!

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