Talks by Clinton R. Nixon

Scala is a language for the Java Virtual Machine that combines the power of Java with the flexibility of a dynamic language and the capabilities of a functional language. We’ll explore how Scala can make standard object-oriented programming more concise and powerful, and how it can make concurrency easy and clear. We’ll specifically show how these capabilities can be used with languages you might already be using, Java and Ruby.

I gave this talk at Developer Day in Durham, NC. I tried to make it a good introduction to what Scala is and why you might use it. Even more fun, I wrote my slides in Markdown and generated them with my own Scala slideshow-generation application.

• The slides
• The presentation and sample code
• Links to resources from the talk

This is one of my favorite talks I’ve given. I gave it at Refresh the Triangle in October 2008, and again at Viget Labs in November 2008. It’s a far-ranging talk about my techniques to transform myself from an ADD-plagued procrastinator to a focused person and get more enjoyment out of both work and play.

• Links to resources from the talk

I unfortunately used some images I don’t have rights to in this talk, so I’m not posting the slides at this time. I’m more than willing to talk about it, though, and am continuing to sharpen this talk. If you’re interested in me presenting it to your organization, email me at crnixon@gmail.com.

I gave this tutorial talk at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference 2008. It covers a wide area, ranging from how to install Rails plugins to detailed walkthroughs of plugin code. This is a great talk to hear if you want to know more about the internals of Rails or writing extensions for any Ruby library.

• Extending Rails, Part I video
• Extending Rails, Part II video
• See the slides at Slideshare

There are many plugins and resources mentioned in the talk and I’ve put all these resources on their own page.

In December 2007, I gave this talk at Refresh the Triangle.

• Video of the talk on Vimeo.com
• Slides of the talk on Google Docs
• Collection of resources, stored on del.icio.us
• Subversion repository with code from the talk

I gave this presentation at OSCON 2007. I make no promises that the slides are super-useful without the talk, but who knows? Feel free to download, reuse, remix, or whatever.

The executive summary: legacy PHP code has a tendency to have very particular problems. Here’s three refactorings to deal with those particular problems.

See the slides on SlideShare.com.