Basics

Hi! I'm Lyza Danger Gardner.

In 2007, three smart people and I formed Cloud Four, we we build, teach and strategize about the mobile Web. I'm a developer, and spend my time split between building things and talking or writing about those things.

Writing and Speaking

I like to write. My co-founder Jason Grigsby and I wrote Head First Mobile Web (O'Reilly) in 2011. I have written shorter things in various places, including A List Apart, .Net Magazine, Cloud Four's blog and sundry other print and online publications.

I also like to speak. I've spoken at conferences and delivered workshops around the U.S. and in Europe, including Mobilism, Breaking Development, DConstruct, Neilsen Usability Week, Web Visions, Over the Air, and PhoneGap Day.

Things I Do

I have been working on the Web since the mid-1990s, with a mobile and pan-device focus since 2007. The basic things I do include:

• Building web sites
• Making web sites work well on a lot of devices
• Building hybrid native apps (e.g. PhoneGap)
• Making complicated web applications
• Making web sites not suck
• Paying attention and thinking a lot about what's going on with web standards and the future of the web

The "building" piece of this includes what you'd generally expect of a web dev:

• front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
• back-end languages (PHP, python, ruby)
• web environment components and middleware (MySQL, PostGreSQL, apache)
• tools and workflows (PhoneGap, version control, deployment, SASS, Coffee)
• various ill-defined dev skills (the ability to spell things correctly for the most part, pixel-pushing in PhotoShop, speed with virtual duct tape)
• knowledge of how to figure things out and where to go for information