Matt Biddulph
Hacker
Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for intelligent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.
Webstock 09
Made of messages
The A in AJAX stands for Asynchronous. But asynchronous is not just for the clientside. Any non-trivial webserver can benefit from being able to do two things at once in the service of the user. Find out how to perform reliable background processing, reduce page render latency and scale your application's load over a cluster of servers using message queues. This talk will be illustrated with real examples from dopplr.com, but will be generally applicable to any web developer.
Hardware hacking for fun and profit
We're used to creating systems that create millions of web pages, database rows and files every day. But our code rarely makes anything happen in the physical world beyond blinking a few lights in a server room somewhere. The good news is that the kind of electronic components that drive your washing machine, your car, your entertainment system and your giant killer robots are now ridiculously cheap, easy to program and come with convenient USB sockets. This talk will guide you through the basic of making your own devices using the Arduino platform and open-source software, and demonstrate a few reasons why you might want to do so.