What I'm doing in December

Aside from being really busy at work, I’ll be giving three talks at users groups in December. How did I end up agreeing to give three talks in one month? People heard me talking about some topic and they asked me to talk to their group on it. If asked, I’ll usually agree. I’m trying to tie them together thematically to make it a three-parter (and encourage people to come to all three meetups) so I’m calling the series: ’Tis the Season to Write Web Apps, A Three Part Adventure.

Development Tools: Git and Github (aka, ‘Tis the Season to Write Web Apps Part 1)

Web414

7PM, December 9th, 2010 @ Bucketworks

I’ve been asked to talk about Git and Github and give a basic intro on how to use it. I’ll also talk about my developer workflow and technical team collaboration. I’d also like to point out that Ralph Holzmann will be talking about LABjs and yepnope.js after my talk. It should be a great night with lots of technical content!

PHP vs Rails (aka, ‘Tis the Season to Write Web Apps Part 2)

Milwaukee PHP Users Group

6PM, December 14th, 2010 @ Bucketworks

This talk started as the idea of comparing how traditional LAMP servers differ from how application servers behave. I’ll be covering Apache and phpmod, some information about nginx, and compare performance. A very basic web app will be used as an example and I’ll introduce some tools used for benchmarking web applications. Note that the topic has seemingly mutated from “LAMP servers versus Application Servers” to PHP vs. Rails, possibly to draw out more folks by using good keywords ;)

What’s new and great in Rails 3! (aka, ‘Tis the Season to Write Web Apps Part 3!)

RubyMKE

7PM, December 20th, 2010 @ Bucketworks

I’ll be talking about what’s different in Rails 3 and what stays the same. A perfect follow-up to those that want to know about writing for an application server after the MKE PUG talk. I’ll have a ported version of the basic web app from the MKEPUG talk.

All code and slides will be available here and on my Github after the talks. I’ll hopefully have time to put together summary blog posts afterwards, too.

Also: Be sure to join us at MilwaukeeDevHouse5 on December 3rd, 2010, 5PM-midnight. The description from Web414:

This will be the first MilwaukeeDevHouse with a purpose… In the past we just called it a “party with laptops” and invited you to come and work on whatever you wanted to. You can still do that, but we’re also going to focus on ways to make BarCampMilwaukee (and Bucketworks) better. Call it “Hack the BarCamp!” or maybe “Hack the Bucket!”

See you there!