Events

I have spoken at and reported on hundreds of events around the world.

Thursday, 29 September 2016

Bel Expo Centar
Your Favourite New Language - The Future of Swift

Voxxed Days Belgrade

Whilst open sourcing a language is nothing new, Apple's unprecedented step has caused massive excitement and activity for this new language, with a flurry of development and contributions. In this presentation I would like to explore the current potential of Swift and what's going to be possible in the future. I will cover: - What can be accomplished with 'open' Swift - What's missing from 'open' Swift - Back end Swift and MVC - Swift on non-Mac desktops - Swift on non-iOS mobile devices - Extending Swift - What's next?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYdDOHVxK0
Monday, 19 September 2016

Prague, Czech Republic

Write The Docs EU

Outside of my technical writing work for software projects I have been creating a board game. A board game also requires mechanics to function and players to clearly understand how these mechanics work to use and appreciate fully. As part of my research for writing game manuals I looked at manuals for furniture, electronics, and cars to see how they explain to users how to setup and use their products. In this presentation I will look at how the technical writing skills of different industries can learn from each other. This will include: - Game Manuals and tutorials - Assembly instructions (e.g. those wonderful Ikea inserts) - Service Manuals for electronics And as part of looking at these case studies, the presentation will cover: - Iconography vs Text - The limitations of updating print manuals - Reducing language and cultural colloquialisms - Identifying what needs to be said and what doesn't And by the end of the presentation I hope that everyone will have learnt a lot from each other and realize that we're all trying to achieve the same thing(s).

https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/eu/2016/speakers/#speaker-chris-ward
Monday, 12 September 2016

RADIALSYSTEM V, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin

Ignite Berlin

Games have been with us for centuries, from those that emulate battles like Chess and Risk, to the intricate mysteries of Go. In the past decades the world of boardgames has growing in popularity, breaking into the mainstream with games like Catan. However the industry is generally staunchly traditional in the way it produces and markets it's ideas. Until recently. In this presentation I will look at how digital versions of games, tabletop simulators, app augmented games and kickstarter have changed the world of cardboard and look to the future to see where this may lead.

https://igniteberlin.com/
Friday, 8 July 2016

Noesis Thessaloniki Science Center & Technology Museum, 6ο χλμ. Οδού ς Τ.Θ. 60330 Θέρμη, Thermi 570 01, Greece
Android Programming Without Java

DroidCon Greece

The battle between Google and Oracle may finally be over, but let's face it, the relationship between Android developers and Java is still a rocky one. In this presentation I would like to look at the potential for Android development with a series of alternatives to Java, especially Go, Dart, Kotlin and Swift. I will introduce the languages, analyze their potential and what is achievable with them, seeing if any of them are viable alternatives to the Java behemoth.

https://2016.droidcon.gr/speakers/chris-ward/
Wednesday, 29 June 2016

sektor5 Coworking Café+Lobby, Siebenbrunnengasse 44, Wien 5
Building Cross Platform Apps with Electron

Vienna.JS

Electron is a fantastic tool for creating cross-platform apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that look and feel _relatively_ native to the hosted Platform. In this presentation I'll give a quick overview of what's possible.

https://www.meetup.com/viennajs/events/227800060
Tuesday, 28 June 2016

sektor5 Coworking Café+Lobby, Siebenbrunnengasse 44, Wien 5

Vienna.html

An insight look on how to build a print-at-home Chip Shop (offline) board game with printed paper cards (72 products, 76 events and 36 personalities) that let you run a computer company in the 80's to build your silicon empire. Learn how to turn cards in markdown files as used on the game website into high-quality printable PDFs for a premium pre-boxed or print-yourself card deck version and much more.

https://viennahtml.github.io/
Sunday, 15 May 2016

Tirana, Albania

Oscal 16

In this presentation I'll be dragging LaTeX out of the past kicking and screaming and be showing that it's actually kinda cool.

https://oscal.openlabs.cc/
Thursday, 5 May 2016

OpenTech Summit

We spend countless hours creating technically amazing projects built upon awesome, cutting edge code. We then promote our project through newsletters, events and social media and await certain success. But nothing happens. Why? Whoops, we forgot to tell anyone how to effectively use our project, all that time waisted. In this presentation I want to draw upon my experience in writing tutorials and technical documentation to help you write clear, concise and usable documentation for your own projects.

https://opentechsummit.net/programm/#OT2-10
Thursday, 21 April 2016

Central Hall Westminster, London
Back To The Future With Static Site Generators

DevWeek London

If you remember when web sites were all created with plain HTML pages, then you'll know that CMSs and dynamic web frameworks saved us and solved all our problems. Or did they? In fact, we instead spend a lot of time customising existing code to meet our requirements, grappling with deployments and then whacking caching on top of over-powered servers to get an ounce of speed. Static Site Generators aim to sit somewhere in the middle and are perfect for semi-dynamic sites and with a little learning, better for content creators. In this session, Chris will look at an overview of the principles and options for static site generators and deep dive into one or two to explain further how the work and can fit into your projects.

https://devweek.com/agenda#back-to-the-future-with-static-site-generators
Friday, 18 March 2016

Tuschinski Theater(near Rembrandt Plein), Reguliersbreestraat 26, Amsterdam.
The Past, present and Future of Swift

MDevCon

Whilst open sourcing a language is nothing new, there is no denying the popularity of Apple's new language and this has solidified with their recent move. In this presentation I would like to explore the new projects created by and with Swift and see where this may lead in the future. We will look at: - What can be accomplished with 'open' Swift - What's missing from 'open' Swift - Back end Swift - Swift on Linux - Swift on Windows - Will Swift on Android be possible - What's next for Swift?

https://mdevcon.com/posts/2016/02/01/chris-ward/
Monday, 29 February 2016

Cineplex, Wienerbergstraße 11, 1100, Vienna, Austria
Developer Health

Voxxed Days Vienna

We keep up to date with the latest developments in technologies and tools. We make sure to post pull requests to fix bugs we found in projects. We offer helpful advice in forums to people with coding questions. We propose talks for meetups and conferences to provide insight and inspiration. All this on top of our day job. When in the midst of all this activity do we stop to think about our mental or physical health? The mental stress of sustained periods of high intellectual activity is draining and exhausting. The Physical impact of having such a sedentary job is becoming increasingly recognised. And all those caffeinated and sugar filled drinks we consume to keep going? Yeah, they're not that good for us either. In this presentation I will look at quick tips to keep ourselves a little healthier whilst we do what we love. I'm not talking gruelling evenings huffing and puffing at the gym, but manageable and easy advice to whip you into shape.

https://voxxeddays.com/vienna/
Saturday, 20 February 2016

Poor & Literate, Kopenhagener Straße 77, 10437 Berlin

Poor and Literate Short Stories

I will be reading the intro from my '[One Day the World Ended](onedaytheworldended.com)' project at this cosy little bookshop.

https://www.facebook.com/events/498210087018059/
Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Game Science Center, Besselstrasse 14 Berlin, 10969
The Future of Cardboard

Talk and Play no. 17

How digital games are influencing board games and vice versa. I will discuss the numerous ways that board games are joining the digital era.

https://www.meetup.com/BerlinGameScene/events/227497230/
Saturday, 30 January 2016

H.2215 (Ferrer), Fosdem
Programing a Board Game

Fosdem 2016

Programming a Board game? Why would you want to do that? In this lightening talk I will take as few turns as possible to explain why and how I decided to program a board game. Yes, a physical, printed board game. We will look at wondrous technologies such as Markdown, Pandoc, LaTeX and chaining them all together to create a multi-format generating workflow and (hopefully) win.

https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/board_game/
Tuesday, 19 January 2016

Saftladen, Waldemarstr. 37, 10999, Berlin

Art Game meetup

This is a meet-up group for people interested in games as audio/visual interactive art, with less focus on mechanics or gamer culture. I will be speaking about the ongoing design process of creating the Chip Shop Board game using a computer coding framework.
Thursday, 7 January 2016

Creating a plugin for Jekyll

Ruby User Group Berlin

Jekyll is an awesome static site generator written in Ruby. It's designed with simplicity in mind, but can be made more extensive and powerful by creating plugins and leveraging existing ruby gems. In this presentation I'd like to give a quick overview of how...

https://www.rug-b.de/events/january-meetup-2016
Tuesday, 8 December 2015

Why I decided to code a Boardgame

up.front Berlin

_(and how tools written in obscure programming languages helped)_ Just over a year ago I had a great idea for a boardgame where players get to run a computer company in 1980s America. As a programmer of over 15 years, it seemed obvious to me to code the game and this led me down a meandering path of obscure toolsets where I discovered some amazing gems. In this presentation I want to introduce you to the why and how I did this, what I discovered, how it can help you and the digital future of cardboard.

https://up.front.ug/2015/12/08/meetup/
Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Understanding Distributed Databases

Coding Serbia

The single node backend is dying or dead. A single instance of a database is no longer sufficiently available, resilient or elastic to cope with the quantities and changing requirements of data that modern applications demand. A single point of failure is no longer an option.

https://codingserbia.com/
Monday, 5 October 2015

Introducing Crate, the scalable SQL Database

Dublin NoSQL with Crate.io

Using Crate a distributed database (Crate has a NoSQL base but is queried in SQL) as an explicit example Chris will show the theory and practice behind their component architecture, along with some basic but extremely cool queries to show what's possible with it. He will demonstrate the basic practicals of querying and coding for Crate using the gitHub archive.

https://ti.to/tcube/dublin-nosql-crate-io
Monday, 5 October 2015

Understanding Distributed Databases

CloudOpen Europe

Modern applications store a lot data and demand high availability of access to it. To cope with this increasing need, developers have long struggled with scaling, sharding and synchronizing multiple instances of traditional databases.

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/cloudopen-europe/program/schedule
Saturday, 3 October 2015

Introducing Distributed Databases

WebCamp Zagreb

The single node backend is now dead or dying, let's look at the future.

https://2015.webcampzg.org/talks/view/introducing-distributed-databases/
Thursday, 1 October 2015

Introducing Distributed Databases

Voxxed Days Belgrade

In this presentation we will look the fact that in large scale and complex web applications the single node backend is now dead or dying. A single instance of a database is no longer sufficiently available, resilient or elastic to cope with the quantities and changing requirements of data that modern applications demand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLuRDv7Ad0Y
Wednesday, 30 September 2015

GitHub revisited - Analyzing 100s of Million of events in realtime

Code.Talks Hamburg

In this presentation we revisit an infamous talk from Strata conference in 2012. We will look at importing, querying and analyzing the millions of events generated from one of the internet's most popular tools, GitHub.

https://www.codetalks.de/2015/programm/github-revisited-analyzing-100s-of-million-of-events-in-realtime
Monday, 28 September 2015

Managing Distributed Databases with Apache Mesos

Apache Big Data Europe

Apache Mesos is a fantastic tool for abstracting CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual). Alongside these features is Mesos-DNS, which provides service discovery for all applications and services running in a Mesos cluster. These features combined lets you program against your datacenter like it's a single pool of resources, a useful tool when building highly scalable applications stacks.

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe/program/schedule
Thursday, 24 September 2015

Developer Health

Reject.JS - Berlin

In this presentation I will look at quick tips to keep ourselves a little healthier whilst we do what we love. I'm not talking gruelling evenings huffing and puffing at the gym, but manageable and easy advice to whip you into shape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AlmhhnfJ-E

Thursday, 29 September 2016

Bel Expo Centar

Monday, 19 September 2016

Prague, Czech Republic

Monday, 12 September 2016

RADIALSYSTEM V, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin

Friday, 8 July 2016

Noesis Thessaloniki Science Center & Technology Museum, 6ο χλμ. Οδού ς Τ.Θ. 60330 Θέρμη, Thermi 570 01, Greece

Wednesday, 29 June 2016

sektor5 Coworking Café+Lobby, Siebenbrunnengasse 44, Wien 5

Tuesday, 28 June 2016

sektor5 Coworking Café+Lobby, Siebenbrunnengasse 44, Wien 5

Sunday, 15 May 2016

Tirana, Albania

Thursday, 5 May 2016

Thursday, 21 April 2016

Central Hall Westminster, London

Friday, 18 March 2016

Tuschinski Theater(near Rembrandt Plein), Reguliersbreestraat 26, Amsterdam.

Monday, 29 February 2016

Cineplex, Wienerbergstraße 11, 1100, Vienna, Austria

Saturday, 20 February 2016

Poor & Literate, Kopenhagener Straße 77, 10437 Berlin

Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Game Science Center, Besselstrasse 14 Berlin, 10969

Saturday, 30 January 2016

H.2215 (Ferrer), Fosdem

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

Saftladen, Waldemarstr. 37, 10999, Berlin

Thursday, 7 January 2016

Tuesday, 8 December 2015

Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Monday, 5 October 2015

Monday, 5 October 2015

Saturday, 3 October 2015

Thursday, 1 October 2015

Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Monday, 28 September 2015

Thursday, 24 September 2015