Category Archives: Conference

London Bot Framework Meetup the Third

Welcome to the Third London BotFramework Meetup! Here's the line up

On Wednesday 22nd November 2017 I had the pleasure of running the third London Bot Framework meetup at the lovely Just Eat office in central London. The offices have been recently upgraded and the new meetup space has a huge 9 screen display a multiple mic speaker system, including a fantastic CatchBox throwable mic for ensuring everyone hears the audience questions

It has been a year since the previous one (whoops) but it was great to see some familiar faces return in the attendees. I had forgotten how much fun it is to emcee an event like this! Maybe next time I’ll be sure to just emcee and not also commit presenting a session too.

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MVP led TechDays Online: Videos!

As part of Microsoft’s recent Tech Days Online, I was very pleased to be able to record a couple of short videos about botframework, LUIS, the QnA Maker, and how I have been working with JustEat to use these technologies in their Customer Help chatbot solution.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the live TechDays sessions, so instead of an hour or two of my dulcet tones you only have the pleasure of ten minutes; feel free to replay those minutes as many times as you like!

First up, a ten minute session on the JustEat Customer Care chatbot implementation:

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MVP led TechDays Online

MVP led TechDays Online

On February 20th to 22nd you’ll be able to join MVPs like me at the 3 day online conference UK Tech Days Online.

This is a chance for MVPs to talk about some of the cool new MS tech that’s out there, show you how to use it yourself, and give a few case studies. This year it’s all about AI, Bots, Data Science, and Azure OSS – awesome stuff!

Since I’m not able to attend this on the day of the event, my fellow Bot MVP, Gary Pretty, will be accompanied by the talented James Mann (no doubt a Bot MVP in the next round of awards!) for a couple of sessions on Day 1 all about BotFramework, LUIS, and the various features and tooling around that ecosystem.

So that you don’t miss out on my handsome visage (!), I’m pre-recording a short session at Microsoft over the next couple of weeks, which will hopefully be played here and there throughout the conference, where I give a very brief case study for the JustEat Help chatbot; it’ll be a tasty Bot infomercial snack – don’t miss out!

Full Schedule

20 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Data, data, data – How and where to store it on Azure?
  • 11.00pm: Conversational UI using the Microsoft BOT Framework
  • 12.00pm: Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services: Make your BOT smarter!
  • 1.00pm: The best kept secret, Document DB.
  • 2.00pm: Let’s discuss Server-less.
  • 3.00pm: Keynote: Dr Mike Rys What is an Azure Data Lake?

21 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Creating a PHP-MySQL web app in Azure App Service and deploying using FTP.
  • 11.00am: Gain profit from Azure app service tooling as an OSS developer.
  • 12.00pm: Dockerizing Your Cross-Plat .NET Development.
  • 1.00pm: Communication Driven Development.
  • 2.00pm: Monitoring Linux in Azure with Microsoft Operations Management Suite Log Analytics.
  • 3.00pm: The Open Source World of Xamarin.

22 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Bootstrapping blockchain.
  • 11.00am: How IOT and data is changing lives.
  • 12.00pm: An introduction to Quantum Computing.
  • 1.00pm: Social Scientist Professor Bradley Love from University College London and the Alan Turing Institute
  • 2.00pm: Microsoft Regional Directors panel.

If this whets your appetite for nerd knowledge, pre register now at https://aka.ms/uktechdays2017

I’ll Be Speaking At OSCON EU

OSCON

I’m lucky enough to have been allowed to speak at OSCON EU this year, with – as per usual – the awesome Dean “Wrote The Book On Web Performance” Hume (that’s his legal full name, thanks to him having actually written a book on web performance).

OSCON – the Open Source Conference – “celebrates, defines, and demonstrates the best that open source has to offer.” From small businesses to the enterprise, open source is the first choice for engineers around the world, and OSCON is the place to celebrate that.

The workshop we’ll be presenting is Automating Web Performance – first thing on Wednesday morning.

As regular readers may notice, I do like my web performance optimisation – in fact, I’ve spoken about it once or twice.

What’s different this year is that .Net is finally open source, so, as long time .net-ers, we felt it was time to spread the .Net love amongst the open source community! I’m really excited for this conference – a different focus (I’m used to almost everyone at the conference talking about a similar thing to me – i.e., web performance optimisation – and the line up at OSCON is exceptionally diverse), a different location (the wonderful city of Amsterdam) and a different format for us (a 90 minute workshop instead of a 40 minute presentation).

We’ll be talking about tech that, although not specific to .Net, can be applied to such web projects – and to pretty much any other tech stack too – in order to reap the benefits of automated web performance optimisation.

We’ll go through automating the optimisation of images, css, javascript, and html, as well as introducing WebP images, critical css, unused css, and ultimately automating the continual testing of these optimisations.

It’s going to be a great start to the third day of the conference; if you’re attending, and you’re looking for something fun to start your last day with, then come and sit in with us – you won’t regret it!

If you’re not already attending and I’ve managed to convince you how wrong you are, then perhaps you’d also like to get 25% discount off of your ticket? How does that sound? And a cookie? Just use the code SPEAKER25 when you buy your ticket for that discount, and come find me at the conference for that cookie. *

(* cookie may not exist; the cookie is a lie)

EdgeConf 2015 – provoking thoughts.

edgeconf 2015 logo

Recently I was lucky enough to attend this year’s EdgeConf in the Facebook London offices.

Edgeconf is a one day non-conference all about current and upcoming web technologies, filled with some of the big hitters of the web development world and those instrumental in browser development.

The structure of an average section of Edgeconf is to give a brief intro to a topic which the attendees should be eminently familiar, then have everyone discuss and debate this topic, throwing out questions and opinions to the panellists or each other, such that insights can be gained as to how to better implement support in browsers, or what the web community could do to help adopt it, or decide it’s just something that’s not ready yet.

It’s very different to a normal conference, and is utterly engrossing. The fact that the attendees are hand picked and there are only a hundred or so of them means you end up with extremely well targeted and knowledgeable discussions going on.

I think I saw almost every big name web development twitter persona I follow in that one room. Scary stuff.

Having been fortunate enough to attend the 2014 Edgeconf, where there were some fascinating insights into accessibility and – surprisingly – ad networks not always being the baddies, I was looking forwards to what the day could bring.

Before the conference all attendees were invited to the edgeconf Slack team; there were various channels to help everyone get into the spirit as well as get all admin messages and general discussion.

During the day the slack channels were moving so rapidly that I often found myself engrossed in that discussion instead of the panel up in front of us.

Incredibly, every session – panel or break out – was being written up during, and presumably also after, the event, which is an achievement within itself. There was a lot of debating and discussing going on for the entire day, so hats off to those who managed to write everything up.

Hosted in the fantastic Facebook London offices, with their candy shop, coffee bar, and constant supply of caffeinated beverages, we were all buzzing to get talking.

facebook

Panel discussions

The morning started in earnest with several panel discussion on security, front end data, components and modules, and progressive enhancement.

The structure was excellent, and the best application of Slack that I’ve seen; each panel discussion had a slack channel that the panel and the moderator could see, so the audience discussions were open to them and a few times audience members were called out to expand on a comment made in the slack channel.

When we wanted to make a point or ask a question, we merely added ourselves to a queue (using a /q command) and the moderator would ensure a throwable microphone made its way to us as soon as there was a break in the panel discussion.

These squishy cubes were getting thrown all over the crowd in possibly the most efficient way of getting audience participation.

These discussions covered some great topics. I’m not going to cover the specifics since there were live scribes for all of the events:, the notes for which can be found at the edgeconf hub – I only appear as “anon” a few times..

Break out sessions

After a break to re-energise and stretch, we could choose which of the 13 breakout sessions to attend during the afternoon (yes, 13!).

These were even less formal that the panel discussions, which really weren’t very formal anyway. They took some of the points raised on the relevant panel’s slack channel or the google moderator question list that had been circulated for several months prior to determine the panel questions also.

The attendees split into one of 4 or 5 sessions at a time, huddled around a table or just a circle of chairs, and with one person leading the main discussion points everyone tried to contribute to possible directions.

For example, we spoke about web components and tried to understand why they’re not being used more; same for service worker. These are great technologies, so why do we not all use them?

The sessions covered service worker, es6, installable apps, sass, security, web components, accessibility, RUM, front end data, progressive enhancement, network ops, interoperability, and polyfills.

Summary

Although Edgeconf will have their own next steps, my personal ones will appear as subsequent posts here. Some of the topics have inspired me to put down further thoughts .

The write up from co-organiser, Andrew Betts, is a great read.

Stay tuned!

London Web Performance Group meetup

London Web Performance Group Meetup

I’ll be speaking with my cohort, Dean Hume, at the next London Web Performance meetup on Oct 14th at the Financial Times offices!

We’re presenting an extended (director’s cut?) version of our Velocity NY 2014 session, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive where we investigate a selection of websites exposed by the HTTP Archive as well as talk about how to use Google’s Big Query and dig into some awesome example queries to explore what’s happening in the interwebs.

The LWPG is where you can “meet with other web site system administrators, developers, designers and business people who’re interested in making their sites work fast to get better user experience, lower abandonment rates and make more money.

If you’ve read Steve Souder’s books and you use ySlow & PageSpeed and you want learn more or share your knowledge please please sign up!”

Go on – you know you want to!

My face is in a video! Velocity Conference Interview

As part of my appearance at this year’s Velocity Conference NYC, I have been interviewed for the O’Reilly youtube channel and also the podcast.

In it I’m covering the contents of the upcoming talk that I’m doing with Dean, such as the HTTP Archive and Google’s Big Query and how people should approach these in order to get the most out of it.

I also mention some of the common pitfalls that poorly performing sites are doing, as well as what the good and the great are doing – some of their sneaky tricks.

If you’re attending Velocity Conf in NYC right now, then why not have a little look and get a sneak peak before attending the full session on Wednesday at 5pm

What I’m looking forwards to at VelocityConf NYC 2014

There’s a good mixture of Performance and Mobile sessions in my list, and a couple of Operations and Culture ones too. However, there are so many conflicting sessions that are awesome, so please let me know your thoughts to help me decide!

Day One

I saw Tammy Everts‘ vconf session last year, Understanding the neurological impact of poor performance, which was fascinating. Her tweets are great resources for web performance.

As such, I’ll start the conference with Everything You Wanted to Know About Web Performance (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Then I’ve got to decide between Colin Bendell’s (Akamai) Responsive & Fast: Iterating Live on Modern RWD Sites and Patrick Meenan’s (Google) Deploying and Using WebPagetest Private Instances

Unfortunately, then my ability to make a decision completely fails! I can’t decide between these three:

Finding Signal in the Monitoring Noise with Flapjack, RUM: Getting Beyond Page Level Metrics, and an Etsy-powered mobile session – Building a Device Lab. Help!

I’m planning to finish day 1 with W3C Web Performance APIs in Practice

Day Two

Following the ever-impressive opening sessions, I’ll head over to see a Twitter session: Mitigating User Experience from ‘Breaking Bad’: The Twitter Approach, then it’s decision time again: either The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com or A Practical Guide to Systems Testing.

Following that, how could I miss Yoav Weiss talking about how Responsive Images are Coming to a Browser Near You?!

Then I’m deciding between another Etsy session – It’s 3AM, Do You Know Why You Got Paged? – and another Tammy Everts (and Kent Alstad, also of Radware) session – Progressive Image Rendering: Good or Evil?.

I’ll finish the day with another session from Yoav – Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Preloader? – and Etsy’s Journey to Building a Continuous Integration Infrastructure for Mobile Apps, probably.

Day Three

After some more kickass sessions opening the day, I’ll head over to see Signal Through the Noise: Best Practices for Alerting from David Josephsen (Librato).

After that will be Handling The Rush, then another descision between How The Huffington Post Stays Just Fast Enough and Creating a Culture of Quality: How to Sell Web Performance to Your Organization

During the break there will be a couple of jokers talking about the Http Archive, Big Query, and Performance using .Net and Azure! I’ll not miss that for the world! They’re amazing! And ridiculously handsome. kof
Office Hour with Dean Hume (hirespace.com) and Robin Osborne (Mailcloud)

The afternoon will be made up of Test Driven Mobile Development with Appium, Just Like Selenium, Making HTTP/2 Operable and Performant, AND THE AMAZING LOOKING HTTPARCHIVE+BIGQUERY SESSION The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive (which is going to be AMAZINGLY EPIC)

DONE!

Then beers, chatting with other like-minded nerds, and a spare day to wander around NYC before an overnight (I believe the term is “red eye”) return flight.

My schedule

You can check my full schedule here, should you want to be creepy and stalk me.

I’ll be speaking at Velocity Conference New York 2014!


Velocity New York 2014

For the second year running I’ve been invited to speak at the fantastic web performance, optimisation, dev ops, web ops, and culture conference VelocityConf; in fact, it has become the essential training event and source of information for web professionals over the years it has been running.

Last year was the Europe leg of the conference, in London. This year I’ll be jetting off (via the cheapest possible flights known to google..) to New York City!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive

I’ll be speaking once again with Dean Hume (who has literally written the book on website performancee) about The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive; we’ll be talking about technologies like the HTTP Archive and Google’s Big Query, but mainly about the secrets learned from some of the great sites and their dev teams, as well as some of the traps from some of the not so great sites. In most cases we’ll look at one small change which could help those no so great sites become a bit more great!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 5:00pm
  • Room: Sutton South

Come and see us!

Venue

New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019
map

Office hours

Dean and I will also be hosting an Office Hours session where you’re invited to come and say hello, and talk to us about your Windows, .Net, Azure, EC2, web performance concerns or ideas; we’d love to have the opportunity to meet and speak with you, so please come and say hi!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 2:45pm
  • Table 1 (Sponsor Pavilion)

DISCOUNTS!

There’s never been a better year to attend Velocity Conference; the line up is amazing, the contents are incredible, and the opportunity to talk with experts and passionate developers is priceless.

If you’re not sure how to convince your manager to send you – try the official Convince your Manager steps!

Once you’ve sorted that out, register and use the code given to you by your speaker friend (me!), for a whopping 20% discount: SPKRFRIEND.

You want more?


Velocity New York 2014

Velocity Conference EU 2013

The 3 day conference of web performance and operations & culture wrapped up recently, and having had the honour of presenting a session with my partner in crime Dean Hume called Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images, and wandering around with the green underscored “Speaker” lanyard, here’s a brief summary of the event and some of my personal highlights.

Keynotes

First up, here are all of the keynote videos over on youtube; there were some really great keynotes including several from various sections of the BBC; some highlights for me were Addy Osmani’s UnCSS demo, Ilya Grigorik’s Big Query lightning demo, and the fantastic Code Club session from John Wards.

Presentations

There were a large number of sessions across three streams (web perf, mobile, and devops) covering all manner of topics from extreme anomaly detection in a vast torrent of data, through to optimising animation within a browser.

Some of the stand out sessions for me were:

Making sense of a quarter of a million metrics

Jon Cowie gave a brain melting 90 minute session taking us through how Etsy make sense of all of their monitoring data; given that they graph everything possible, this is no easy task.

Understanding the neurological impact of poor performance

Tammy Everts not only gives us an insight into the poor aeroplane connectivity where she lives, but also how people react emotionally to a poor performing website.

Rendering Performance Case Studies

Unfortunately this session clashed with the Etsy metrics one, but from what I heard it sounds like Addy Osmani had one of the best sessions at the whole conference.

High Performance Browser Networking

Another brain-melt session; Ilya gave an incredible insight into the complexities of fine tuning performance when taking into account what HTTP over TCP (and also over 3G) actually does.

Other Resources

All of slide decks are here, all of the keynotes are here, and there’s even a free online version of Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking book.

Summary

I probably enjoyed the 90 minute tutorial session on Wednesday more than the rest of the conference, but the Thurs and Fri were really jam packed with excellent sessions and impressive keynotes.

I loved speaking there and will certainly be pitching for more such conferences next year!