Justin Carmony » Presentation

Why I Give Presentations

Justin Carmony — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:20:37 +0000

Today I gave a presentation at WordCamp SLC 2011. It was titled “Demystifying CSS & WordPress.” I’ve uploaded my slides, and hope you all will enjoy them.

I’ve now given several talks at several groups and conferences, and have learned a lot about giving presentations. Two of the biggest things I’ve learned are first: the quality of a talk is (almost) always directly relational to the amount of time spent preparing. The second is: great talks always require a great deal of preparation.

By the time I had given my second presentation, I realized just how much time these presentations take. Several weeks before the presentation, usually 3-4, I would spend just a week of evenings on research. I’m not that smart of a person, but fortunately there are brillant people all over the internet who publish their findings. After putting together all my research, I’ll spend another week or two in my spare time putting together the slides. Then, the final week I’ll spend practicing and modifying my slides. I usually run through my slides start to finishing 5-6 times (at least). For a 50 minute presentation, that can take a lot of time. While I practice I’ll add, change, and re-order slides so they flow much more smoothly.

All in all, I spend anywhere from 20-30 hours in total preparation. My day job keeps me really busy, so I only have time for this at night. That is 30 hours I could spend playing a video game, or doing side work, or spending time with my wife, or so many more things. So I had a decision to make. Do I really want to prepare 2-3 presentations a year?

I decided “yes,” because after each presentation that I put a lot of work into, I get comments like this:

Amen! RT @RickGalan: @JustinCarmony Dude, your preso was awesome. Looking forward to reviewing on your site. #wcslc

Then, tonight at the “after-dinner” with attendees and speakers, I got this email:

Just had to say thank you so much for a great presentation today – You made CSS approachable and a possibility to learn – thank you!!

I feel like if I pick up the book you recommended there might be hope for me after all!

all the best,
Kayla

These comments and others told to me in person make it all worth it. Not that I feel special, but I love helping others learn. I have the battle wounds of learning a lot of these technologies, and helping others to learn them more clearly is awesome.

So thank you, all my attendees and listeners! Thank you for all the “Thank You’s”, and I look forward to giving more presentations in the future.

Speaking at WordCamp SLC

Justin Carmony — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:32:55 +0000

I have a few posts I need to write, but wanted to quickly mention I’ll be speaking at WordCamp SLC this saturday on Demystifying CSS & WordPress. They have a bunch of other great sessions lined up. Looks like there are only 8 tickets left, so if you want to go, hurry up and register!

My 2009 Technology Recap

Justin Carmony — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:55:31 +0000

Its been two years now that I’ve been a more or less “serious blogger.” I had using the term blogger, since when people hear about blogs, they think of people either detailing their entire lives, or pumping some angel. For me, blogging has just been a way to share information with people I know locally, and those I don’t even know who find my blog via searching. I’ve had a few spurts where I blogged quite frequently, but for the most part it was just here and there.

I’ve gone back and looked at this year of 2009, and the things I’ve blogged about, and I thought I’d give a little recap.

My CSS Conversion

At the beginning of the year I realized I had 100% percent to using CSS. I’m still a little in awe that being such a table junkie I finally did it. There were a few key things that I did to help me learn all the difficult things with CSS. I hope I can help some poor web developer out there understand their CSS a little better.

A Year of PHP IDEs

I really invested some time in trying out and experimenting with several PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I had been using Zend Studio for several years, however more and more I found myself frustrated with it’s quirks. However, I haven’t had time yet to blog about the new IDE I am using, NetBeans. I’ve made the switch from Zend Studio to NetBeans, and while I’m not completely sold, I’m still giving it some time. Maybe over christmas break I’ll blog some about it.

Interesting Challenges w/ MySQL

While I haven’t blogged about most of them, I have had some interesting challenges w/ MySQL over the last year. One was converting 40 Million rows from a MyISAM engine to an InnoDB Engine. I’ve been having some serious heart-to-heart conversations with MySQL (metaphorically of course) on how I’m going to scale it to millions and billions of rows. I think I’ve mapped out in my head how we’re going to handle it for Dating DNA. That will be one challenge I’ll be addressing in 2010.

New Blog Design

This year I got around to re-designing my blog using the Carrington Theme as a base. I kinda like it, but it still could use a little more polish. One day I’ll find time to give it that extra polish.

Memcached

This year I really got into the theory on how to design an application with Memcached. I’ve decreased the load on several websites by using it, and wrote an in-depth article on the theory of caching, and how to implement it effectively. I’ve been amazed at how well it works, and that I hadn’t used it before.

A Year of Presentations

I’ve given two presentations this year, my Memcached presentation at UPHPU, and my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I got great feedback from both presentations, and I look forward to what I’ll present on this upcoming year. I’m thinking about putting together a presentation called “Being a Web Ninja with jQuery,” and showing of the dozen of awesome applications I’ve built using jQuery.

Utah Open Source Conference 2009

This year I helped organize and throw together the Utah Open Source Conference. I was made the Sponsorship Manager, and it was interesting trying to talk to companies in a recession about donating to a non-profit conference. I haven’t had a chance to blog about different techniques on how to professional ask for money for something like this, but hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to share some insights.

Things I Didn’t Blog About

There were a lot of things I didn’t get around to blogging about this year. I’ll quickly touch on them here, and hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to blog about them more.

Web Services – I’ve done a LOT of web service work. Web services provide a unique challenge, since many times its hard to debug them. At my old job, one of the biggest challenges is we really couldn’t debug our web services until all of the other pieces of the puzzle were done. Then we spent long hours with trial and error, debugging via dumping logs. I’ve learned a lot of tricks with PHP and web services. Hopefully I’ll be blog more about those soon.

Performance Tuning LAMP – I’ve had to do a lot of tuning to keep the Dating DNA website afloat. Because of the awesomeness of our iPhone apps, we’ve had a lot of load on our web servers. There are a lot of things you can do to get the LAMP stack to run well.

Alienware Arena – Here was a fun little project I was able to crank out for probably the largest client I’ve done work for: Dell. We made them a website for their Alienware brand called “Alienware Arena.”

There were a lot of challenges to this website, mainly timeline and budget. But we were able to walk away happy with our work, and the Dell / Alienware team were really happy. It was interesting going through and trying to copy / mimic the look and feel of the Alienware website. I’m really proud of what we made.

Never Ending iPhone App Store Saga – Anyone who knows me has heard of the bloody wars that my current employer has had with Apple, their iPhone, and the App Store. The ridiculous approval process, the extremely long wait periods, and Apple’s OCD when it comes to their phone. I won’t say much anything else on the topic, but boy it has been frustrating.

What to Expect with 2010

Boy, 2010 will be interesting. What to expect? I’ll be doing some pretty sick programming in jQuery, as I’ll be adding integrating chat to the Dating DNA website. What else? A lot more when it comes to integrating websites into other social network platforms.

From a business platform, 2010 will be a lot of work spent on taking some great ideas and trying to monetize them. While working on awesome stuff is great, its important to pay the bills with them. I will have an entire year to sign up Sponsors for the 2010 UTOS Conference instead of 2 short months.

Hopefully I’ll get in a better habit of documenting my discoveries and solutions here in my blog. Sharing information is the best way to help everyone out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and good luck in the new year! 2010, here we come!

Presentation: Real Life Scaling

Justin Carmony — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:39:44 +0000

Here are my slides for the presentation that I gave at the Utah Open Source Conference on Friday. It was an awesome conference, and I am glad that I was able to be involved.

Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.

Speaking: Utah Open Source Conference 2009

Justin Carmony — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:13 +0000

I will be speaking this year at the Utah Open Source Conference this year. My presentation is “Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites.” Here is the abstract:

Scaling is a real issue for many websites. However, many developers try to implement solutions used by the giants of the internet: Google, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc. However, many of these techniques are designed for very unique and high demand situations. Implementing these techniques prematurely to smaller websites can lead to overly-complex solutions that can be difficult to manage, and even hinder progress.

See real life examples of from two popular websites: cevo.com and datingdna.com. Learn what challenges and bottlenecks they faced, and the solutions they created to overcome them. Find out what optimizations and implementations returned the greatest ROI for scaling with the project.

CEVO is an online gaming league that hosts thousands of matches for hundreds of video game events. They have contracted with DirectTV, Dell, and other companies to offer branded gaming events. Because the company is run by a staff spread across the USA and Canada, the website runs 100% of their business. Hundreds of gaming servers and player clients communicate with CEVO’s APIs to get real-time information. Learn how they’ve handled the ever increasing load on their servers.

Dating DNA is an online dating community that integrates with today’s popular social networking sites. The site has exploded since it released its iPhone App, which is currently the #1 iPhone Dating App. Learn how Dating DNA has scaled from having daily user sign-ups increase 1000% in a matter of weeks.

This presentation will be given by Justin Carmony, a lead developer for both projects.

I will be speaking on Friday, Oct. 9th at 7:00 PM. I’m looking forward to presenting and have my slides done early for once. Hopefully you all will enjoy it! If you aren’t signed up to attend this year, really consider! It is going to be a very awesome, there are a lot of great of local, and national, presenters. Use the coupon UPHPU to get 50% off attendance! See you there!

Steamlined Web Development Presentation Video

Justin Carmony — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:26 +0000

Alright, it looks like the Victor at UPHPU has gotten my presentation up on Steamlining your web development. Since it was the first night Victor had tried to capture video & audio to mesh them together, the video on the presentation is a little bit further ahead than the audio. However, I think the presentation went quite well. You can view all the UPHPU meeting videos here. Here is the presentation I gave: