Archives

Archives / 2020 / October

  • Southern DevFest (virtual)

    I will be presenting Cryptography 101 at Southern DevFest:

    Learn the fundamentals of cryptography, including public/private and symmetric encryption, hashing, and digital signatures. Discover which techniques are appropriate for various situations. Review practical real life examples for storing passwords, protecting URL parameters, securely exchanging information with partners, and safely encrypting sensitive information on public web sites. Concepts apply to all platforms, examples will be in C# for both .NET and .NET Core. 

  • Scenic City Summit 2020 (virtual)

    I will be presenting two sessions at Scenic City Summit 2020:

    • Cryptography 101
      Learn the fundamentals of cryptography, including public/private and symmetric encryption, hashing, and digital signatures. Discover which techniques are appropriate for various situations. Review practical real life examples for storing passwords, protecting URL parameters, securely exchanging information with partners, and safely encrypting sensitive information on public web sites. Concepts apply to all platforms, examples will be in C# for both .NET and .NET Core. 

    • Make the Web Faster!
      This session demonstrates practical techniques that drop a web page's size from almost 3MB to 143K, and load time from 6 seconds to less than a second, while looking the same! Review tools that validate and describe performance best practices. Explore how to defer resource requests, load resources asynchronously, and prefetch critical resources. Many other performance improvements will be discussed, which can reduce response time while also boosting the scalability and reliability of your site. Learn the techniques that can have the largest impact on web performance with the least amount of work.

  • Microsoft Student Ambassadors, Kenya - HTTPS (virtual)

    I'll be presenting "Encrypting the Web (HTTPS)" at Microsoft Student Ambassadors, Kenya:

    Does your entire web site require HTTPS? If it doesn't now, it better soon! Major browsers now label all HTTP pages as "not secure". Most browsers also require HTTPS to use new features like HTTP/2, service workers, and progressive web apps. Discover the many benefits of using HTTPS beyond just confidentiality, including integrity and trust. Review adoption strategies, including how to use HTTP response headers such as Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) and Content-Security-Policy. Learn about he misconceptions around HTTPS, and that it isn't as hard to implement as you think.

  • .NET Cambridge (virtual)

    I'll be presenting "Advanced Fiddler Techniques" at .NET Cambridge:

    Fiddler is a great free web diagnostic tool that nearly everyone uses, but typically only for very basic things.  If all you need is to see the requests made between the browser and web server, the browser devtools can do that.  Fiddler has many more advanced features that most developers are unaware of.   It can be used to capture traffic from smartphones, tablets, and non-Windows platforms!  Discover the power of manipulating requests and responses with breakpoints, the auto responder, and a visual composer.  Review popular extensions for formatting JavaScript, syntax highlighting, and detecting image bloat.  Go beyond the basics and learn the full capabilities of the tool and how it can improve your web development and debugging techniques today!

  • Minnebar 15 - Pi-hole (virtual)

    I'll be presenting "Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole" at Minnebar:

    Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole!  It is free small DNS server that is "a black hole for Internet advertisements" that runs on a Raspberry Pi.  We'll talk briefly about the Raspberry Pi, then learn how to setup Pi-hole on your network for use with all of your devices.  With a low cost Raspberry Pi and an hour of setup time, we now surf faster and more securely, with nearly 40% of our DNS queries blocked.  Its amazing how much more enjoyable using the web can be, you'll cry when you have to surf without it.

  • Progress Ninja

    Excited to announce I was recently named a Progress Ninja telerik.com/ninjas for community activities related to Fiddler!  I have been using Fiddler Classic for more than a decade and starting to use the newly released cross-platform Fiddler Everywhere.  Check out my Fiddler Pluralsight courses at https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/fiddler-chrome-developer-tools-debugging-website and https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/fiddler and watch for more talks on Fiddler in the future!

  • Minnebar 15 - HTTPS (virtual)

    I'll be presenting "Encrypting the Web (HTTPS)" at Minnebar

    Does your entire web site require HTTPS? If it doesn't now, it better soon! Major browsers now label all HTTP pages as "not secure". Most browsers also require HTTPS to use new features like HTTP/2, service workers, and progressive web apps. Discover the many benefits of using HTTPS beyond just confidentiality, including integrity and trust. Review adoption strategies, including how to use HTTP response headers such as Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) and Content-Security-Policy. Learn about he misconceptions around HTTPS, and that it isn't as hard to implement as you think.