Past events

The discussions on what constitutes negative, biased, and diverse language continue in many open source communities, often sparking heated, and strongly-opinionated debate. But if you have decided what language you want to increase, decrease, or change in your community, how do you enforce and track those changes? In this presentation I look at how to use the open source language linter tool, Vale, to check text (in supported locations and formats) for rules and styles you define. I start with showing how to setup and configure the tool, and then how to use existing rule sets, or create your own. Finally I show how you can track progress during initial language overhauls, and how to track violations moving forward.

Developers are users too! In this presentation I give a quick overview of the growing field of developer experience (DX), and how to tailor developer-focussed projects to meet the demands and needs of this very particular user group.

This year at Fosdem I’m helping organise the Documentation tooling developer room, so drop on by.

I cover the basic principles, tooling, and processes of “docs-as-code”.

API documentation can originate from many sources, and take many forms, so how do you ensure that the content is accurate and crucially, works? In this presentation Chris looks at options for testing, standardising, and checking your API documentation is as good as your API.

User experience has been a fundamental part of modern products for some time, but for tools aimed at developers, there is a growing focus on “developer experience” (DX, DevEx). Documentation is a key component of developer experience. As people with an eye on making sense out of technical complexity, documentarians should feel qualified and empowered to improve more than just documentation.

I’m back at Write the Docs EU again, but this time handling social media and the legendary writing day for the event.

I report on the latest updates and best practices for Kubernetes and Cloud-native computing.

A two day celebration of the next generation of web apps.

I’m back at SXSW! I am super excited and looking forward to hearing amazing presentations, enjoying warmer weather, and… BBQ 😋.

The conference on everything related to governance, collaboration, legal and economics within the scope of FOSS.

TBC

I am attending World IA day in my home town of Berlin to dig more into creating inclusive information architetcure.

This year at Fosdem I’m just attending for fun 😄.

As a lover of open source software and communities, Chris is attending this one day event to discuss how we keep our communities supplied with what they need.

Chris represents the Ethereum Foundation at DevRelCon to learn how to apply techniques from the broader tech ecosystem.

I’m back at this high-level business and political discussions on 5G global deployment, including on how to turn visions into real business models, as well as the four key vertical markets which could have the biggest benefits from the introduction of 5G Smart City, Smart Mobility, Smart Healthcare and Industry 4.0. The Forum will also include the latest 5G technology presentations. A two-day agenda at the heart of the Baltics will bring together up to 1000 attendees - European policymakers, government officials, business leaders, investors, industry experts, start-ups and academic representatives, including 60+ senior speakers from Europe, Asia, and the USA.

I am attending Data Natives in my home town of Berlin to dig more into the affects data science will have on our future society.

I’m at TechKomm’s main event for the year running two meetups for participants to discuss testign documentation, AI in documentation and more.

I’m attending my first O’Reilly event as they are in my home town! Yay.

Join me to discover the latest innovations in containers, cloud, DevOps, IoT, servers, web frameworks, plus many other Apache projects and communities in a collaborative, vendor-neutral environment.

I am mentoring hackers at this cross-blockchain hackathon.

I’m delivering a workshop with the Remix team about getting started with Solidity development, and will also be around to talk about Ethereum education.

I’m back at one of my favourite events in the Balkans, this time just to sit back and listen to some talks.

I’m back at Write the Docs in Prague again, but this time handling social media and the legendary writing day for the event.

The longest night of Startups in Berlin is back! I’ll be wandering the streets to see what interesting ideas I can find.

I am volunteering with ETHBerlin to create the knowledge base hackers use during the legendary hackathonn to find the information they need to participate.

I am appearing on a panel to discuss ethics in tech and what responsibilities developers have in the discussion.

I am speaking about the responsibility of developers when it comes to the ethics of big data.

Tech writers are increasingly reliant on linters, grammar checkers and other tools to help us write. Are they useful, or are they bending our writing to our robot overlords will?

I head to Belarus to find out what the tech and startup scene has to offer.

I speak at the Umbraco official conference to give a 40 minute crash course in improving documentation.

I travel to Barcelona to report on the latest updates and best practices for Kubernetes and Clound-native computing.

Chris represents the Ethereum Foundation at Latitude59 to discuss the future of work, the incentive economy, and more.

Chris covers how to create an engaged developer community, specifically focussing on Crypto and Web3 projects, but with inspiration drawn from wider open source and tech ecosystems.

Chris talks about what Web3 can learn from “traditional” tech industries to improve how projects engage with developer communities.

Chris represents the Kauri project at ETHDenver to show enthusiastic developers and writers how to contribute their Ethereum knowledge to the platform.

This year at Fosdem I’m helping organise the Documentation tooling developer room, so drop on by.

Chris represents the Event Store at DDD Europe to show enthusiastic developers the concepts of event sourcing with Event Store.

Chris represents the Kauri project at Codemotion Berlin to show enthusiastic developers and writers how to contribute their Ethereum knowledge to the platform.

Chris represents the Kauri project at Revision Berlin to host a discussion on decentralised information for technology projects.

Chris joins the people building and operating open infrastructure at the OpenStack summit. With over 200 sessions and workshops on Container Infrastructure, CI/CD, Telecom + NFV, Public Cloud, Private & Hybrid Cloud and members of open source communities like Kubernetes, Docker, OPNFV, Ansible, Ceph, ONAP, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack.

API The Docs is an event for tech writers, API developers, product owners and developer evangelists who embrace documentation as a crucial aspect of a great developer experience. The conference is a great opportunity to share and discuss the latest best practices, strategies and new trends relevant to API documentation and developer portals!

Chris and Cate are back at Europe’s pre-eminent event for Startups. We’re keen to meet interesting products, projects and people.

Chris visits “crypto island” to discover more about Blockchain on this small European nation.

As a lover of open source software and communities, Chris is attending this one day event to discuss how we keep our communities supplied with what they need.

Chris delivers a workshop drawing from his experience as a technical writer to explain how to explain complex ideas clearly and effectively.

Chris delivers a Q&A and workshop on pitching your ideas to the press.

IT Arena takes place on 28-30 September in 2018 (2 conference days at the stadium and 1 day with meetups in the historical city center) and Chris is back to see what Ukranian entrepreneurs are working on.

Chris and Cate attend high-level business and political discussions on 5G global deployment, including on how to turn visions into real business models, as well as the four key vertical markets which could have the biggest benefits from the introduction of 5G – Smart City, Smart Mobility, Smart Healthcare and Industry 4.0. The Forum will also include the latest 5G technology presentations. A two-day agenda at the heart of the Baltics will bring together up to 1000 attendees - European policymakers, government officials, business leaders, investors, industry experts, start-ups and academic representatives, including 60+ senior speakers from Europe, Asia, and the USA.

I’m back at Write the Docs in Prague again, but this time handling social media for the event.

Chris heads to Dezentral, which aims to be an inclusive blockchain conference by bringing newcomers, builders and longtime hodlers from all over the world together to Berlin for a day full of immersion.

Chris and cate are back at IFA, the world largest consumer electronics show to see what crazy ideas the world is working on.

Chris investigates the wonderful world of African tech at Afrolynk 2018. A conference where entrepreneurs, accelerators, policy makers, chambers of commerce, and VCs within the African /European tech ecosystems have the opportunity to get valuable insights from each other!

At this one day event I’ll give a short presentation on my advice for starting and maintaining a freelance career as a technical writer.

Discussions on various aspects of a decentralised future.

A blockchain conference purely for makers and creators, sounds intriguing!

At this evening meetup I’ll give a short presentation Docfx, a static site documentation tool from Microsoft.

This time around for Tech Open Air, Chris is flying solo to hear from a whole bunch of amazing ideas and of course attempt to attend as many side events as possible.

The conference on everything related to governance, collaboration, legal and economics within the scope of FOSS.

We’re finally visiting Login and Vilinus to see what the Lithuanian tech and startup scene has to offer. This trip is kindly supported by Telesoftas.

At this one day event I’ll give a short presentation on my advice for starting and maintaining a freelance career as a technical writer.

This year I’ll be at the UK games expo purely for fun, but always happy to talk games, technology, storytelling and play a game or two with you.

Developers of voice and chat assistants are crying out for good writers to help them create the conversational interfaces of the present and future. In this talk, I will introduce what constitutes a ‘good’ conversational experience and how we, as writers, can benefit from this trend.

Developers of voice and chat assistants are crying out for good writers to help them create the conversational interfaces of the present and future. In this talk, I will introduce what constitutes a ‘good’ conversational experience and how we, as writers, can benefit from this trend.

Both event stores and blockchain offer technology that creates a constantly appending log of immutable data, so how are they different? In this presentation I’ll be on the beautiful island of Mauritius to take a look.

I’ll be on the beautiful island of Mauritius to present on this new documentation tool I’ve been experimenting with and how you can use it for your projects.

I’ll be attending the Katapult Future fest in Oslo to what we in the tech industry can do to help the public like and trust us again. I’ll also appear on a panel or two.

I’m attending the preeminent conference for documenentarians in the US, I hope meet you there and talk about all sorts of interesting topics.

I’m visiting wonderful New Orleans for the glorious Collision Conf, I’m sure there will be a lot of fun to be had and I hope to see you there.

My first ever SXSW! I am super excited and looking forward to hearing amazing presentations, enjoying warmer weather, and… BBQ 😋.

We’ll be in Barcelona from February 25 to January 1 and available for interviews, appointments, parties etc.

I will be discussing ethics in design. More to follow.

Bosch ConnectedWorld’s purpose is to provide the inspiration, education, and connections you need to thrive in IoT. This February, we will host more than 140 speakers on four stages presenting IoT trends and implementations in front of more than 3,500 conference and hackathon participants.

Backend/frontend developers, product owners, product managers, UX experts in Germany! If you’re planning to participate in the Bosch ConnectedExperience (BCX) two-day Internet of Things (IoT) hackathon, then also mark your calendar to attend the “Investor Tea Time Pitch” which will be hosted by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. You’ll get to see selected IoT startups pitch their projects to invited investors and then you’ll also be able to network with those investors and startups.

I will be discussing linting your documentation. More to follow.

This year at Fosdem I’m helping organise the Documentation tooling developer room, so drop on by.

Are you into APIs? Then you should be at API Days Paris and I’d love to meet with you to talk about planning and documenting this glue of modern applications.

I will be reading a new piece of short fiction on the subject of ‘Dead of Winter’.

I’ll be at the venerable CCC this year, possibly running a documentation assembly, watch this space for details.

I’m back at Finovate for the first time in 3 years, and this time in Dubai. I’d love to hear about what you’re working on.

Developers of voice and chat assistants are crying out for good writers to help them create the conversational interfaces of the present and future. In this talk, I will introduce what constitutes a ‘good’ conversational experience and how we, as writers, can benefit from this trend.

As programmers, designers, writers and those who pursue ‘creative’ pursuits we consider ourselves mostly immune to the predicted forthcoming robot invasion of our jobs.

As programmers, designers, writers and those who pursue ‘creative’ pursuits we consider ourselves mostly immune to the predicted forthcoming robot invasion of our jobs.

In this presentation I will explore other ways to communicate concepts beyond words to show that documentation needn’t just be about technical writing.

Chris is talking about sound quality and editing out echoes. Especially useful in Berlin Altbaus!

I am back in beautiful Nürnberg and it’s developer week to give another installment of my documentation for developers talk.

Whilst at Developer Week in Nürnberg I’ll be at their “Ask the Experts” community night, helping you understand how to explain complex topics.

Documentation is essential for potential users to understand your awesome coding efforts.

If you’re at the Pioneers festival in wonderful Vienna, I want to hear from you! Let’s share a coffee and a slice of strudel and tell me what you’re working on.

If you’re at the Next Web festival in cheerful Amsterdam, I want to hear from you! Let’s share a coffee and a slice of cake and tell me what you’re working on.

Explain Yourself! Documentation for Better Code (Chris Ward) - How many times have you come across an awesome looking library or tool that you’re keen to work with in your own project but can’t even begin to understand how to use it?

Cate will be speaking about how technology is increasingly impinging on every corner of our lives, including our sex lives.

Games have been with us for centuries, from those that emulate battles like Chess and Risk, to the intricate mysteries of Go.

Atom is the hackable text editor begun by GitHub, it was also the first application to use the Electron framework for creating native applications in JavaScript. Thanks to it’s underpinnings, customising the editor and creating your own packages to extend functionality is relatively simple. In this presentation I will show how to change and extend Atom with configuration, themes and creating your own package with the Atom API, showing practical examples with the packages I have created.

I’ll be attending Europe’s pre-eminent event for digital business. I’ll be keen to meet interesting products, projects and people.

Explain Yourself! Documentation for Better Code (Chris Ward) - How many times have you come across an awesome looking library or tool that you’re keen to work with in your own project but can’t even begin to understand how to use it?

I’m back at the infamous FOSDEM, this time to talk about how the Electron framework may or may not help our cross-platform dreams.

I’m back at the infamous FOSDEM, this time to talk about making your documentation polished by automating spelling, grammar, testing, screenshots and so much more.

A whole day meetup, organised in collaboration with GDS, to explore the tools, processes and methodologies that teams use to write documentation in an agile environment.

I’ll be attending Europe’s pre-eminent event for Startups. I’ll be keen to meet interesting products, projects and people.

In this presentation I’ll examine how various diverse sources have taught me how to write better technical documentation.

I will be play testing and promoting my board game Chip Shop at the infamous Spiel messe in Essen. Drop by stall A109 in hall 4 and say hello!

Explain Yourself! Documentation for Better Code (Chris Ward) - How many times have you come across an awesome looking library or tool that you’re keen to work with in your own project but can’t even begin to understand how to use it?

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.

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.

Games have been with us for centuries, from those that emulate battles like Chess and Risk, to the intricate mysteries of Go.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I will be reading the intro from my ‘One Day the World Ended’ project at this cosy little bookshop.

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

Programming a Board game? Why would you want to do that?

This is a meet-up group for people interested in games as audio/visual interactive art, with less focus on mechanics or gamer culture.

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.

(and how tools written in obscure programming languages helped)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The single node backend is 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.

Whilst not a part of the core documentation of projects, presentations and delivering them to the public are an essential part of spreading the word about what you do.

Crate is a distributed database that allows you to create a flexible and scalable backend suited to a wide variety of purposes. By deploying and managing your Crate Cluster using Docker, you benefit from simple scalable capacity, resilience and portability, no matter how complex or large your application becomes.

Read more

In this short presentation I gave an overview of the development and build process behind the Chip Shop boardgame.

In this short presentation I gave an overview of what Developer Advocates are and what we do.

In this talk we’ll focus on the use of Crate alongside Weave in Docker containers, the technical challenges, best practices learned, and getting a big data application running alongside it.

In this talk we’ll focus on the use of Crate alongside Weave in Docker containers, the technical challenges, best practices learned, and getting a simple web application running alongside it. You’ll learn about the reasons why Crate.IO is building “yet another NoSQL database” and why it’s unique and important when running containerized applications.

Crate.IO have made a fully open source distributed SQL database that offers a wide variety of features behind a standard SQL Interface. Perfect for the ever changing needs of IoT, Chris will show you why we decided to create the database, how it fits into the database landscape and how to use it.

In this talk we’ll focus on the use of Crate alongside Weave in Docker containers, the technical challenges, best practices learned, and getting a simple web application running alongside it. You’ll learn about the reasons why Crate.IO is building “yet another NoSQL database” and why it’s unique and important when running containerized applications.

What other creative endeavours use the concept of ‘open source’?

Crate is a distributed database that allows you to create a flexible and scalable backend suited to a wide variety of purposes.

How Crate integrates with Amazon Web Services

Scale Your Database like Your Application: Crate is a distributed database that allows you to create a flexible and scalable backend suited to a wide variety of purposes. Read more

What are the new paradigms for User Experience with the new wave of always listening devices such as Siri and Google now?

I love the works and worlds of HP Lovecraft, here’s a talk I have done occasionally, it’s usually followed by a reading.

My MelbJS Feb 2014 talk on how CMSs (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Expression Engine) use JavaScript.

Why Melbournians should come to DrupalSouth.

What’s the workflow for DevOps in Drupal? We look at tools, tips and examples.

When running an organisation or service that is reliant on the efforts of volunteers, members or a community to run and sustain itself, it can be hard to attract recruits and really tell them what you need help with. Many make it difficult to access information and get involved, with technology making accessing this information easier and easier, why not take advantage of it.

Learn how to utilise Drupal to power your mobile app or website.

Advice, tools and tips for tweaking, testing and debuging your mobile apps.

Your view of the world is wrong. In this session we learn how and why many conventional maps are incorrect and why it may or may not matter. We also look at some of the sad, gory and checkered stories that have lead to what we know about the world. Or think we know…

The various methods to customise a CiviCRM installation to meet your needs and requirements.

How Drupal handles security and privacy.

A history and analysis of the Godfather of cosmic horror, HP Lovecraft.

I love the works and worlds of HP Lovecraft, here’s a talk I have done occasionally, it’s usually followed by a reading.

An overview of how to use CiviCRM with Wordpress.

An overview of blogging with Drupal and moving from other platforms.

A basic intro to PhoneGap and Titanium Appcelerator for web developers.

A basic intro to JQuery Mobile for Cross Platform developers.