Keeping it Weird Portland

Portland, I think I'm in love with you. I've now been out to visit you twice and I have had a great time on both occasions. This time out I started off my trip by doing my presentation on Android Speech Recognition at OSCON. I had a decent number of attendees to the presentation and some good engagement from the people who have bothered to rate my talk. I find it hard to be really informative when you only have 40 minutes to talk. I focused on imparting information and telling jokes rather then running though code. If anyone is interested you can always download my slides or check out the code of my example application on my github repo.

Next up on Thursday I got a chance to relax and enjoy the conference where I saw some great presentations. In particular the one on Hacking Your Body: Running as Performance Tuning by Dave Neary was great. Not unlike myself Dave ran into problems with IT Band Syndrome so I was interested to hear what he could do to work around the problem and the answer is something I've hit upon myself, Interval Training. Also, Mary Jane Kelly did this great talk on using an EEG monitor to mind control an Arduino robot.

Thursday night I got a chance to meet up with former Ottawa dweller and now Netflix employee Dan Menard for supper and attending the GitHub Drink Up. Much thanks for the folks at GitHub for putting on the event and for putting out such a great product in GitHub. All the PhoneGap developers were in attendance as well so it was great getting a chance to hang out for everyone again.

Friday was the extremely well attended and sold out PhoneGap Day. There were a metric ton of great presentations and if you want to check out mine on my side project Corinthian you can grab my slides. I met a bunch of folks IRL that I only know from twitter and the PhoneGap Google Group. Rather than to list everyone and accidentally insult someone by missing their name let me just say it was great to meet all of you.

Till next time Portland!

Updated Speaking Engagements

I got some really positive feedback for my Adding Speech Recognition to Your Android Applications presentation that I did at AnDevCon III. I'm incorporating that feedback and I'm going to be giving the talk a couple of more times over the next two months:

• Ottawa Android - Ottawa, June 20th
• OSCON - Portland, July 18th

In addition I'm going to be at PhoneGap Day talking about my side project Corinthian. Basically, Corinthian monkey patches a bunch of stuff that should work in the Android WebView and adds some extra UI elements as well.

• PhoneGap 2.0 Day - Portland, July 20th

If you are going to be in or around those cities on those dates ping me on twitter and we'll see if we can arrange a meet up.

Our OSCON PhoneGap Slides

Well the PhoneGap presentation that Becky Gibson and I gave at OSCON this year seems to have been well received. Thirteen people have rated us so far giving us an average of 4.15 stars out of 5 which I consider to be pretty good. If you are looking for the slides and example code you can find it here.

Next up for me is an internal presentation at the end of the month and then I will head down to Ottawa chapter of CocoaHeads to talk about developing cross platform mobile apps with PhoneGap.

Update: Now available on SlideShare as well.