About

Derek Allard

I'm Derek Allard - a programmer, author, and award-winning (woo-hoo!) instructor working in Toronto. I'm also Technology Architect at EllisLab, and spend my day building the PHP framework CodeIgniter, and the most flexible Content Management System on the market, ExpressionEngine. I hold an honours Bachelor of Environment Studies, and a Master's of Education - not really the "nerd background" that most people expect.

I'm also a standards and accessibility supporter, a scripting and database guy, and an open source/Mozilla advocate. I'm the author of BambooInvoice, an Open Source online invoicing system. Here are the arbitrary images of me, including one of the Derek Allard action figure.

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In 2002, I had the privilege of winning "Instructor of the Year" for Computer Specializations in the Computer Studies program at Seneca College; and 2004 I was fortunate enough to be awarded the prestigious "Excellence in Teaching" award in part-time studies at McMaster University.

I remain an active instructor and speaker, but mostly because I'm good at it, and enjoy it immensely. At heart, I'm one of those strange people equally enjoys both the "front-end" work of a web application, and the "back-end" work of the server. I spend most of my time working with XHTML, PHP, Javascript and XML.

ExpressionEngine

In January 2007, I was proud to announce that I'd joined EllisLab (formerly "pMachine") to serve as the Senior Technical Support Specialist. In December, I accepted a role as Technology Architect. That's really just a long way of saying that I’m going to work my butt off to keep ExpressionEngine as awesome as it already is.  I'm part of an amazing team of dedicated, smart, and hardworking people.  I'm honoured to count myself among them.

This site runs off of ExpressionEngine. As a designer and PHP programmer, I love the flexibility it gives me. It assumes I know what I'm doing. It helps out where you want help, then get's the hell out of your way when you don't.

The Blog

The purpose of this blog is threefold. First, its a convenient way for me to stay in touch with current and former students. I’m a fairly prolific instructor, and I meet so many interesting people. It’s a shame to lose touch after the course is done, so this is one way to try to stay in touch.

I also wanted to use this blog to track the development and process of BambooInvoice, my open-source project. I describe BambooInvoice as Simple, beautiful, open source online invoicing. It is built on top of the excellent CodeIgniter framework.

Finally, its just a convenient place to dump my thoughts on XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and the world of web programming in general!

So welcome, and thanks for reading.

Kill All Humans

The look and feel of the site has sort of taken on a life of its own. I call it, Kill All Humans. The robot at the top of the page was custom created for DerekAllard.com, by the very talented Scott Thigpen. The orignal Robot ("Peepo"), and was done by, Simon Oxley, who has gained a lot of notoriety for creating the Twitter bird. Most of the other robots are courtesy of Cliff Persaud, and is actually kind of a funny story if you're interested in reading it.