I am just getting ready for my second day in Stockholm, Sweden to go to the bwin offices and talk about professional web development and the change of JavaScript. The professional thing is going to be interesting as I am still feeling the beers of the GeekMeet yesterday night.

Talking of GeekMeet, except for the interesting choice of advertising keywords showing up when you look for it, it was a roaring success and if I had a hat it’d be off to the organizers at Creuna and Robert Nyman for pulling this out of their hats (ok, you killed that metaphor, now let it die in peace).

Over 150 geeks came to drink beer and pizza and had to wait for those by listening to my drivel about website performance and ethical hacking. Some seemed to have been inspired by it, so that’s good I guess.

What I have to say to the credit of the Swedish audience is that they have a great sense of humour and are very happy to get distracted by unexpected slides and side-stories. It was great fun presenting and chatting to people afterward.

Credit must also go to Robert Nyman for not being only a masterly “one, two” announcer but also finding a very nice way to introduce myself – playing hangman with my name using all the emails and messages I sent him over the years telling him off for doing things wrong. Thanks for making me sound like a picky bastard, but I understand that it came from the heart. I also explained that my connection with PPK started the same way – but with him being the picky one.

My first presentation revolved around things you can do to speed up your web sites, unashamedly based on the work done by Steve Souders, Nicole Sullivan, Stoyan Stefanov, Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville. You can get the slides on slideshare:

[slideshare id=819648&doc=shiftinggears-1228434047613720-9&w=425]

The second presentation was (re)introducing the concept of ethical hacking and an invitation for people to see the web as their playground using cURL and GreaseMonkey to remix and improve it:

All in all I had a wonderful time and I was impressed how easy it was for me to deliver all of this in such a short amount of time (I just gave seven presentations and two interviews in three days in two countries, having written the presentations on airports and flights in between).

Sweden rocks! Now I am off to check out the ice bar in the hotel and tomorrow it is back to England.

My talk at the Geek Meet in Craiova/Romania last week covered a topic that I consider terribly important right now. As developers we are constantly shooting ourselves in the foot and create new and improved bullets to make it hurt a bit less instead of not doing that.

We constantly complain about the world, our colleagues, the market and of course our “stupid company” but at the same time we got noone to blame but ourselves for a lot of the stupid things that happen to us.

As developers we have this tiny little bad adviser living in our heads: the feature creature^*.

This one keeps telling us constantly not only to add more features to our solutions but it also gives us a terribly inflated sense of what our job is to bring to the world.

It makes us arrogant and ignorant to the solutions that other developers – just like us – already developed and offer for use. In short, it makes us do the same jobs over and over again as we know best instead of telling us to have a look around at what has already been done and tweak or extend it to our needs.

Instead of spending time on creating well-documented software that is built to be customized and allows for plugins and extensions we keep building the same software types we refuse to use ourselves as they don’t exactly do what we want.

Maybe it is time to shut the little feature creature up and work together on bigger, better and more stable solutions. It is not about who can make the fastest and smallest and most optimized code. This is an extra step we should take when we need exceptional performance, not the common use case.

If you want to go nuts on bringing the best out of hardware and technology, go and do some stuff in the demo scene, this is where I got rid of a lot of my bad habits.

I’ve put the slides up on SlideShare:

[slideshare id=799134&doc=resistingthefeaturecreature-1227921707703820-8&w=425]

^* The feature creature is not my invention, I heard it from a speaker in 2004/2005 at the PHP conference in Amsterdam, but for the life of me I cannot remember who it was. He was ranting about Struts a lot, I remember that.

Both Robert Nyman and Isac Lagerblad just pinged, tweeted and mailed me about the Geek meet in Stockholm in December that I agreed to talk at.

It seems that within an hour all seats were sold out, so I am about to put on my warm boots and mittens and think hard about really writing the presentations I promised:

Shifting your site into the next gear

In this session Chris is showing how you can speed up your web sites, what issues to avoid, what of the information out there is really applicable to you and what little things you can change to get a great impact. As examples we’ll cover lazy loading and progressive enhancement that delivers faster and makes end users happy.

Playing with the web

In this session Chris is going to show tools and ideas that allow you to quickly prototype changes in web sites, get to information that is not offered publicly and re-hash that information into something useful. As examples we’ll be looking at creating a currency converter, translating and detecting language and show how we can change and distribute the change of a web site without touching the server.

Looking forward to coming back to Sweden in December!