Spring is for Speaking: JSConf, WordCamp SF, IACL

Mar 20, 2010

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.