I enjoy presenting at conferences, mainly held in person at interesting destinations, and reimbursing my travel expenses. (I generally do not do remote conferences, unless they are within three timezones of US-East.) I will also talk to a company (or their devs) for an additional fee.
The topics I currently have full-length talks prepared for are:
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My ACRUMEN definition of software quality (title: “Write Better Software with ACRUMEN”). I can also do this as a lightning talk or a keynote.
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Mutation testing (title: “Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)”). I have prepared versions so far with the code in several languages, and have presented on this at many conferences.Â
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Ruby “gotchas” (title: “Ruby Gotchas”). I have done this for local user groups, for about 45 minutes.
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Ping-Pong Pair Programming (title: “Whose Line of Code Is It Anyway?”). This is a hands-on demo with a co-speaker or a volunteer from the audience (or series of them), working on a problem and (at polyglot conferences) in a language both chosen by the audience.
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Breaking into conference speaking (title: “You Wanna Say Somethin’?”). This includes things like why you might want to talk at a conference, how to find the conferences, how to apply to speak at them, and a few basic public speaking tips.
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Making mead (title: “Drink Like a Chinese Egyptian Ethiopian Filipino Finnish Greek Indian Lithuanian Mayan Nepalese Polish Welsh Xhosa Viking: the History and Making of MEAD!”). Yes, this is not a technical thing, at least in the computer sense. ;-)
I also have a lightning talk prepared on why we prepend to lists, instead of appending, when using immutable data. I’m also interested in putting together talks on doctests (such as in Elixir or Python), property-based testing, any other weird dev-testing tricks I find, ways to ease into TDD/BDD, helpful TDD/BDD hints, and more.
Want me to speak on something not covered above? Ask me, and we’ll see.
Definite speaking engagements in the future include:
When | Â | Conference | Â | Where | Â | Topic(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
June 2022 |  | NDC Melbourne |  | Melbourne, Australia |  | Mutants |
July 2022 |  | THAT Conference |  | Wisconsin Dells, WI, USA |  | Mutants |
August 2022 |  | MWM RG |  | Reston, VA, USA |  | Mead |
September 2022 |  | GambiConf |  | Lisbon, Portugal |  | Mutants |
Likely engagements in the next couple years or so, mainly because I was chosen but the conference was canceled or postponed (or moved online too many timezones away, or various other reasons), include:
Conference | Â | Where | Â | Topic(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Build Stuff Vilnius | Â | Vilnius, Lithuania | Â | Mutants |
Code.Talks | Â | Hamburg, Germany | Â | Mutants |
CodeStock | Â | Knoxville, TN, USA | Â | Mutants |
DevDays Europe | Â | Vilnius, Lithuania | Â | Mutants |
I T.A.K.E. | Â | Bucharest, Romania | Â | ACRUMEN |
THAT Conference | Â | Round Rock, TX, USA | Â | ACRUMEN |
US Mensa Annual Gathering 2023 | Â | Baltimore, MD, USA | Â | Mead |
Voxxed Days Athens | Â | Athens, Greece of course! | Â | Mutants |
WeAreDevelopers World Congress | Â | Berlin, Germany | Â | Mutants |
WeRockIT | Â | Huntsville, AL, USA | Â | Mutants |
Speaking engagements in the past include:
Year | Conference | Where | Topic(s) | Link(s) | Mins |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2022 | Code BEAM Europe | Stockholm, Sweden | Mutants | video | 41 |
2022 | ACCU (Ass'n of C/C++ Users) | Bristol, UK | Mutants | video | 70 |
(raw zoom footage, hard to play, fast fwd to 7:55) | |||||
2021 | Polyglot Podcast, released 2021-12-01 |
Online | ACRUMEN and other software quality |
audio and transcript | 44 |
2021 | Scenic City Summit | Online | Mutants | (none yet) | 40? |
(video coming eventually) | |||||
2021 | Scenic City Summit | Online | ACRUMEN | (none yet) | 40? |
(video coming eventually) | |||||
2021 | Code Europe Warsaw | Warsaw, Poland | Mutants | (none yet) | 55? |
(video coming eventually) | |||||
2021 | Code Europe Gdansk | Gdansk, Poland | Mutants | (none yet) | 55? |
(video coming eventually) | |||||
2021 | Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC) |
Kansas City, MO, USA | Mutants | (none) | 45? |
(they don't record sessions) | |||||
2020 | NDC Sydney | Online, darnit! | Mutants | video | 52 |
2020 | DevTalks Bucharest / Reimagined | Online, dagnabit! | Mutants | video | 31 |
2020 | Ruby Rogues Podcast | Online | Mutants | audio | 68 |
2020 | JSConf Hawai'i | Waikiki, HI, USA | Mutants | video | 22 |
2019 | RubyConf | Nashville, TN, USA | Mutants | video | 39 |
2019 | Little Rock Tech Fest | Little Rock, AR, USA | ACRUMEN | video | 45 |
(Sorry for the bad audio, they don't record, so it's from my phone on a tripod, and slightly cleaned up) | |||||
2019 | Heartland Devconf | Omaha, NE, USA | Mutants | video | 44 |
(recorded on my phone) | |||||
2019 | Maintainable Software Podcast | Online | ACRUMEN | audio | 44 |
2019 | Elixir Remote Meetup (September) |
Online | Mutants and Prepending |
video | 45 |
2019 | Ruby on Rails Podcast | Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Mutants | audio | 24 |
(My first podcast!) | |||||
2019 | Abstractions II | Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Mutants | (none yet) | |
(They recorded it but are fixing technical difficulties) | |||||
2019 |
American Mensa's Annual Gathering |
Phoeniz, AZ, USA | ACRUMEN | (none) | 75! |
(Again, more aimed at feedback than teaching, taking advantage of their long timeslots (and big brains)) | |||||
2019 | Software Process Advancement | London, UK | ACRUMEN | (none) | 150! |
(Aimed mainly at discussing and perfecting it, not so much teaching it) | |||||
2019 | NDC Oslo | Oslo, Norway | Mutants | video | 60 |
(My first delivery of this talk, not very good) | |||||
2019 | Nova Codecamp | Reston, VA, USA | ACRUMEN | video | 60 |
(Another one where they don't record so it was just my phone on a tripod) | |||||
2019 | Codecamp Chisinau, part of the Codecamp Romania series |
Chisinau, Moldova | ACRUMEN | (none) | |
2018 | Devconf Poland | Krakow, Poland | ACRUMEN | video | 37 |
(My very first conference talk, so not very well done, sorry!) | |||||
2018 | assorted DC-area Meetups | Washington, DC, USA area | ACRUMEN | (none) | |
2018 | ElixirConf | Bellevue, WA, USA | ACRUMEN | video | 5 |
2017 | RubyConf | New Orleans, LA, USA | ACRUMEN | video | 5 |
2014 | assorted DC-area Meetups | Washington, DC, USA area | Ruby Gotchas | (none) | ~45 |
1990s to Now |
Metropolitan Washington Mensa's Regional Gathering |
Washington, DC, USA area | spam-protection, and non-tech topics |
(none) | 30-45 |
Also, I was one of the co-organizers of TDDConf 2021, the very first international test-driven development conference, and appeared briefly on-screen to introduce speakers and fill time. I was also the sole organizer of Ruby DAYCamp (no website) 2013, a semi-impromptu “overflow” event for those who couldn’t get into Ruby DCamp (defunct, site gone).