A busy autumn lies ahead

… at least conference wise. Next to the OSCON in Portland next week I have been accepted at quite some other conferences in the next month:

First stop will be the Devlink Conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I’ll be doing three talks:

• Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands 
• Distributed Identities with OpenID 
• Crossing the boundaries of web applications with OpenSocial 

And since I have never been in this part of the states before, I also have a few days before the conference to get to know Tennessee. Unfortunately the Devlink conference collides with this year’s Froscon, which I’ll be unable to attend therefor.
After that in September I’ll visit the PHP Unconference in Hamburg, which will be my first unconference ever by the way.
Last but not least there are two great conferences in October, where I’ll be speaking: WebTech 2011 in Mainz (which will be held together with the IPC again) and the Web DevCon in Hamburg.

Bye, bye VZnet, Hello ResearchGate

I already announced it on Twitter a few weeks ago, but it’s time to make an official small blog post about it as well.

After nearly three years, I’ll be leaving VZnet at the end of August. My time there was really great. I learned a lot, wrote my bachelor thesis, launched OpenSocial, OAuth2 and VZ-ID, OEmbed and a lot of other stuff, started speaking at national and international conferences and worked in probably one of the best engineering teams in Germany. And VZ parties are legendary as well.

So I’m certainly feeling a bit sad closing this chapter of my live, but on the other hand I’m really excited about what’s to come:

Beginning September I’ll be joining ResearchGate, the leading social network for science and one of the hottest startups in Berlin. RG is still a bit smaller then VZ (around 50 people), but they have a very international team and I’m very much looking forward to creating something which helps scientists to do their work.

Speaking at OSCON

Yay, my JavaScript Mashup talk was accepted at this year’s OSCON (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18419) and I’m very much looking forward to come to Portland to this great and hugh conference (just have a look at the full schedule). Also I’m very grateful for the ability to present this talk a second time, since doing it this week at the IPC was a lot of fun and I got great feedback on it.

And the best thing if you are think about going there: you can use os11fos as a discount code to get 20% off.

So hope to see you all at OSCON in July :-)

Upcoming conferences

There are some upcoming conferences in the next weeks where I’ll be speaking or travelling to. Here are the details:

First I’ll be speaking at the Quo Vadis Game Development conference in Berlin on the creation of OpenSocial games:

How to create social games for millions of users

Social games have become very popular in the last years. In this workshop I will show you how to create an OpenSocial based game which can be played by over 900 million users on many social networks around the world. After introducing you to the main concepts behind OpenSocial I will demonstrate live that it is easier than you think to develop a rich social game. Additionally to the basics like accessing the user’s social graph through the REST or JavaScript API, communication with backends or integration with external APIs through OAuth, I will also highlight features that will help you with a quick viral distribution, tight integration into the user’s social experience and access through mobile devices.

03. May 2011 - Raum A04 - Beginn: 13:30 Uhr - Dauer: 90 min.

A few days after that I’ll be heading to San Francisco for this year’s Google IO and the OpenSocial State of the Union.

When I’m back the IPC 2011 Spring Edition is coming up where I’ll be presenting on JavaScript Mashups:

Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced Techniques for modern Web Apps

Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques helping you with such problems.

31.05.2011 | 14:15 - 15:15

Originally I had planned to go to the CodeStock conference in Knoxville after that, where my JavaScript Mashup talk had been accepted as well but unfortunately the dates are colliding with the Federated Social Web Conference in Berlin, which I’ll be attending instead now.

CodeStock 2011 Speaker Voting

The speaker voting at this years CodeStock conference (June 3rd/4th in Knoxville, TN) has just opened. I really like the fact that all attendees can vote on the sessions they want to see. So if you want me there and hear about some interesting stuff regarding OpenSocial, OpenID and it’s problems, the Federated Social Web and the protocols around it, or some advanced JavaScript Mash-Up techniques, you can vote for one of my proposals:

Mashing up JavaScript – Advanced techniques for modern web applications

Track / Area: Developer / Web - JavaScript
Technology: JavaScript, WebSockets, CORS, OAuth2, Caja, HTML5
General / Specific Experience Level: Intermediate / Intermediate
Start Time / Length / 70 min
Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend and only provide an API endpoint at their backend, resulting in a much more fluent and desktop-application-like user experience. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques, some older, some brand new, and show you examples which will help you to:

• make API calls to external domains.
• authenticate these calls through OAuth without compromising your secrets.
• load external content and JavaScript widgets safely.
• send JavaScript messages between frames on different domains.
• get real-time notifications from your backend.
• and use the browser to store the some of the user’s data.

http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/mashing-up-javascript-advanced-techniques-for-modern-web-applications.aspx

Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands

Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: Federated Social Web, open standards
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
Social networks are not closed off to the rest of the web anymore. Various standards like ActivityStreams, PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, OpenSocial, Salmon, OEmbed, XAuth or OExchange are emerging to open them up to other websites and projects like Diaspora or Status.NET are already using them in production. I will introduce these protocols, show how they work together, how you can benefit from them and give an outlook on how they can possibly change the world of social networks.

http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/opening-up-the-social-web-standards-that-are-bridging-the-islands.aspx

Distributed Identities with OpenID

Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: OpenID, OAuth, OAuth2, OpenID Connect
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
The era of many separated logins and identities in the web is slowly coming to an end. Currently many of the big players are spurring this on with their own proprietary solutions, but open standards are starting to get more support as well with OpenID being the most promising one. In this session I will start off discussing what identity means offline and online and the ways one uses different identities quite naturally. Based on this I will introduce different concepts of how you can represent your identities in the web, where current problems are and what solutions different players came up with. Besides the currently wide spread proprietary solutions, such as Facebook Connect or Twitter Anywhere, I will highlight OpenID as an open and distributed alternative. I will show how OpenID works for users and developers, where it currently fails and how OpenID is planned to evolve in the future through emerging specifications like OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. Additionally I will give an outlook on how browser vendors could possibly influence the identity game drastically by better authorization support such as the use of client side certificates.

http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/distributed-identities-with-openid.aspx

How to create social apps for millions of users

Track / Area: Developer / Web
Technology: OpenSocial, PHP, JavaScript
General / Specific Experience Level: Beginner / Beginner
Start Time / Length / 70 min
When OpenSocial was first introduced three years ago, the main goal was to create an open and distributed alternative to the closed off Facebook platform for social apps. Since then much has happened: The specification as well as the OpenSocial foundation behind it have majored and powerful new features and concepts have been introduced. More and more social networks are implementing OpenSocial containers, allowing developers to reach over 900 million users with one social app. Additionally education organizations and enterprise companies like IBM, SAP, SurfNET or Atlassian are seeing the benefits of an open standard to connect their applications more tightly and to open them up to other developers. In this presentation I will introduce you to the OpenSocial specification and walk you through a live-programming example to show you how easy it is to connect an existing PHP web application to enterprise products such as Google Mail or Confluence and social networks alike, integrating it right into your user’s existing tools and workflows.

http://www.codestock.org/Sessions/how-to-create-social-apps-for-millions-of-users.aspx