I attended O’Reilly’s Fluent conference in San Francisco earlier this month. The annual event covers various aspects of the Web platform, particularly topics that relate to frontend development. The talks that I attended covered a wide range of topics, spanning from JavaScript performance improvements to unconventional uses for the CSS border-radius property. Fluent gave me an opportunity to reflect on the manner in which the Web is evolving and the opportunities that will arise as it continues to mature.

Earlier this month, Xamarin hosted its first-ever developer conference. The event, called Xamarin Evolve 2013, exceeded all expectations. It offered a great mix of high-quality technical content, fun social activities, good networking opportunities, and plenty of time for the usual hallway banter that tends to create the most valuable discussions at technical conferences. Xamarin Evolve 2013 ran for four days, including two days of training and two days of conference sessions.

I represented Xamarin at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last month. I attended the event, which took place at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, with my coworker Craig Dunn. We had a booth on the second floor of building 92, in the section dedicated to Visual Studio partners. BUILD offered us a great opportunity to spread the word about Xamarin and meet lots of .NET developers. Our booth, where we handed out t-shirts and plush Xamarin monkeys, was very popular.

I flew to Boston last week to attend MonkeySpace, a community-driven event dedicated to open source software projects in the .NET technology ecosystem. The Mono stack is obviously a prominent part of that landscape, but the conference attendees came from a wide range of technical backgrounds—reflecting the diversity of the broader .NET community. I enjoyed many of the talks that were given at the conference, particularly Chris Hardy’s introduction to iOS 6 features, Michael Hutchinson’s MonoDevelop tip walkthrough, Aaron Bockover’s overview of the Vernacular localization system.

After seven fantastic years at Ars Technica, I’ve decided that it’s time for new challenges and new opportunities. I’m really pleased to announce that I’m joining Xamarin’s developer relations team as a technology evangelist. Some of the best and most exciting innovation in the field of software is happening on mobile devices. Tools that accelerate mobile development and boost the portability of existing code can unlock a ton of value. I’ve seen developers build some great things with Xamarin.