About

Hi, my name's Aral, and this is my personal blog — welcome!

I'm a designer, developer, author, teacher, entrepreneur, and performer; a Renaissance Geek with a passion for designing user experiences and a desire to make the world a better place through technology and oratory.

I'm a professional speaker and I regularly perform at international conferences. In 2009, I spoke at the FITC conference in Amsterdam and gave the keynote at the PHP UK Conference in London. In the coming days, I'm scheduled (among others) to give a book reading at SXSW (where I'm also co-sponsoring the Great British Booze-up along with my friends at ClearLeft and BoagWorld), and I'm going to be speaking at the Erhvervsakademi Århus in Denmark and at the Grafill conference in Norway. (Email me at aral@aralbalkan.com if you would like to book me for your next conference.)

I'm trying to use my skills as a developer, orator, and teacher to "work on stuff that matters".

In 2008 I organized <head>, the world's first virtual web conference (with lots of help from my wonderful friends, of course!) It was a proof-of-concept, and a successful one at that, and I'm looking towards evolving the concept in the future.

My company, Naklab, also recently spun off Pistach.io Media, founded with my business partner Dave Stone. Pistach.io is an ad network for influencers.

Open Source

Here are some of my recent open source and community projects:

Books, etc.

Apart from my penning my musings on this blog, I'm a published author and I've contributed to several books and magazine articles.

My recently published work includes the Adobe Flex QuickStart Guides for Adobe.com, The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development book from Friends of ED and opinion pieces and contributions to various magazines.