Codosaurus

I enjoy presenting at conferences, mainly held in person at interesting destinations, that aren’t a royal PITA to get to, 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:

• My ACRUMEN definition of software quality (title: “Write Better Software with ACRUMEN”).  I can also do this as a lightning talk or a keynote.

• 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. 

• Genetic Algorithms (title: “Tight Genes: Intro to Genetic Algorithms”).  Yes I do mean genetic, not generic.  This one includes some heavy live coding, so I prefer to do it in a language I know well, but for conferences about other languages (or whether the “write/run loop” is long), I can fake it with prepped slides.

• Ruby “gotchas” (title: “Ruby Gotchas”).  I have done this for local user groups, for about 45 minutes.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

Likely engagements in the next couple years or so, mainly because I was chosen already but I declined for this year, or the conference was canceled or postponed (or moved online too many timezones away, or various other reasons), include:

Speaking engagements in the past include:

*These conferences don’t record sessions, and I didn’t either.
⁺These conferences recorded, but haven’t yet released it.

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).