Robert Boedigheimer's Blog

I will be hosting some conversations at That Online on Monday, August 3:

• Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole!
  • Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole on your home network.

• Is your website slow and you need some advice?
  • Live web site reviews to demonstrate tools, approach, and techniques to improve performance. Bring your URL and we’ll see what we can find and recommend.

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

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.

I'll be presenting "Cryptography 101" at Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group

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.

I will be presenting Advanced Fiddler Techniques at Frontend Developer Meetup Amsterdam.

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!

Excited and honored to receive the Microsoft MVP award for the 13th year in Developer Technologies!

I'll be presenting "Cryptography 101" at GLUGnet User Group for .NET, Web, Mobile, Database.

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.

I'll be presenting "Cryptography 101" at the Wisconsin .NET USer Group

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.

I'll be presenting "Make the Web Faster!" (virtually) at the Iowa .NET User Group

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.