Category: Portland

Ignite Portland Recap

Dana and I had a blast at Ignite Portland last night. The presentations were wonderful, entertaining and thought-provoking.

If you missed the event, you can still watch the videos of the presentations courtesy of Linuxaid.

One of my favorite parts of the evening was meeting people. Some of the people I met I’ve been following on Twitter. Twitter has contributed to a sense of community in Portland’s tech and creative circles that I haven’t seen before. It’s a wonderful thing.

While all of the presentations were interesting, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on a couple of them:

  • Where Does Imagination Go? — This may have been my favorite of the funny presentations for the night. It was riddled with Lewis Carroll-like quotes such as “Where does imagination go? I don’t know. Imagination can only go where we imagine it to go. And imagination has never gone where I imagined it couldn’t.”
  • That’s Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign ’08 — One of the slides showed how politicians have to be performers. Bill Clinton had to play the sax. Mike Huckabee on guitar. It reminded me of running for student government in high school all over again. Except it’s not high school.
  • Time for Portland to Take Its Place — Great stuff in this presentation. The ideas of following our passions, swing for the fences and build great companies. Portland is the place this stuff can happen. We just need to shoot higher.
  • Beauty in Abandonment — It was great to see Peat on stage and Lyza‘s photo. I didn’t realize Peat was a photographer as well. More to talk about the next time we grab lunch.
  • A History of the Stick Figure — This was a five-minute version of the Helvetica documentary. Great info and history that I didn’t know.

To sum up the evening, Dana turned to me and said, “You better invite me to the next one.” Consider it done.

Speaking at Web Innovators on Feb 13th

I’m going to be speaking at the PDX Web Innovators February meeting on Mobile Web and the upcoming mobile tsunami. I’m excited to have the opportunity to share my love for the mobile web and possibilities available for businesses and developers.

Here are the details:

Graciously Hosted by Nemo Design
1875 Se Belmont St
Portland, Oregon
February 13th, 7 pm
PDX Web Innovators
RSVP Here

In preparation for this event, I’m going to be starting a series of blog posts talking about the mobile market and how it mirrors the early days of the Internet. These posts are likely going to be posted on Cloud Four’s blog, but I’ll be sure to link to them from here.

OEN Award Winners

Silicon Florist announced Jive Software’s award at the OEN Awards based on my tweet earlier tonight. So in the interest of getting it right, here is my wine-colored recollection of the winners:

As always, the Awards Ceremony was fun, the food good, and the videos of all the finalists were inspiring. Congratulations to all of the finalists and winners.

(And I hope I remembered the winners correctly. Did I mention that the wine was good?)

Speed Matters: Presentation Files and Resources

Speed Matters: Presentation and Resources

We had an exceptional audience tonight at DevGroup NW for my presentation on how to speed up web pages. There were a lot of good questions and an engaged audience. Thank you to everyone who showed up. Here is my presentation from tonight as well as some of the resources I mentioned.

The great irony is that I used so many images in my presentation that I can’t compress the pdf files to the degree that I would like. Sorry for the large file size. If it is any consolation, you’ll likely get to fully use your broadband connection unlike when you download web pages and are limited by current connections to a fraction of your connection speed. :-)

Books on Site Performance

Articles & Resources

Measuring Site Speed

Minimizers and Compressors

Statistics & Studies

Thanks to all of the Flickr users who posted their images with Creative Commons licenses. This presentation wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without their photographs.

Congrats to Silicon Florist

Rick Turoczy marks one month of covering the Portland technology community on his blog Silicon Florist. I’ve come to rely on his blog and tend to look at his posts as soon as he notes them on his twitter account.

Because of Silicon Florist, I’ve attended interesting local events like last night’s meeting on Implementing Rails concepts with PHP. Without the Silicon Florist, I never would have known the event was occurring.

After one short month, I can’t imagine not having Silicon Florist in my rss feeds. If you’re in Portland or interested in Portland’s technology scene, you should check it out.