I’ve been head down preparing and delivering presentations all over the place for the past few weeks, and wanted to share the latest happenings, along with where you can get your hands on the material if you weren’t able to attend.

If you’re not interested in the retrospective, then you can head over to my talks page to get the skinny and the resources.

Computer Science Career Awesomeness

Grant Park High School was kind of to invite me down and give me control of the computer science class for an hour to talk about “Careers in Computer Science”. Being that this is something I often end up hearing or discussing with my peers in the tech community, I figured it would be a good chance to share my knowledge with the future Zuckerberg’s and Gates’ of the world.

Although I didn’t record the engaging conversation with the students, I did manage to make an online presentation that goes through the supporting slides. If you’re at all interested, definitely take a look and share your feedback with me here in the comments or via Twitter.

Prairie Dev Con 2015 — Regina, SK

Here I delivered two presentations: Learning to be IDE Free (Java Edition) and 5 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t a Native App. The latter is a re-imagining of my Winnipeg talk entitled “From Web to Device: A JavaScript Story”, where I received some great feedback from Lori Lalonde and Mario Cardinal.

The presentation transformed from, what was supposed to be a happy tale of how fantastic is it is to share JavaScript code between web and device projects, to a blunt conversation about just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We focused on the development points, and so far the feedback has been great.

No online presentation or demo recordings are available yet, but you can get the slides and source code here.

CSONHS 2015 Annual Meetup

What you’ve never heard of the Canadian Society of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery? Well, I have and managed to meet and work with some fantastic physicians and educators during my time working for the Faculty of Health Sciences. One of my many projects, along with being part of the Committee for Online Learning (or CoOL the group) lead me to becoming the sort of “tech expert” on some of the new systems installed and used for improving medical education.

I realize it’s bit of a departure from what I normally discuss, but that was the idea: to change it up a bit. So far, it has proven to be a very interesting area for me and I hope to stay involved and provide technical expertise to physician educators looking to engage new tech. Plus, with things like HoloLens and Microsoft Band, I think the healthcare and the health education landscape is about to see some major changes.

The Point

No real point other than to share the awesomely busy month I’ve had sharing and networking around technology and that you can expect to find more of my “talks” show up on the talks page of the site.

Thanks for playing. ~ DW