My particular areas of interest at the moment are OO design and SOA, pair programming, the effects of dev team social dynamics on code, and increasing community involvement in open source.
Confreaks has a nice collection of videos of my past talks (mostly from Ruby conferences). If you’re looking for a specific talk, check below; I’ve linked videos of individual presentations, where available.
I’m open to speaking invitations at all types of conferences. Send me an email (my twitter handle @ gmail) and please include dates, location, and a link to your code of conduct and/or anti-harassment policy. (Just the text is fine if your site isn’t up yet.)
Upcoming Talks:
- WDCNZ in Wellington, New Zealand (July 2015)
- Forward 3 in San Francisco CA (July 2015)
- Windy City Rails in Chicago IL (September 2015)
- RubyConf Colombia in Medellín, Colombia (October 2015)
Past:
June 2015:
- RubyNation in Washington DC
March 2015:
- Write/Speak/Code in New York City
February 2015:
- RubyConf AU in Melbourne, Australia, February 4-7.
January 2015:
- Boston.rb (Weirich Fellow talk).
December 2014:
- NDC in London, UK, December 1-5.
October 2014:
- Web Directions South in Sydney, Australia, October 30-31.
- Nickel City Ruby in Buffalo, NY, October 3-4.
September 2014:
- Rocky Mountain Ruby in Boulder, CO, September 24-26.
July 2014:
- Brighton Ruby Conference in Brighton, UK, on July 21st.
- ForwardJS in San Francisco, CA, on July 25th.
May 2014:
- La Conf in Paris, France. I did a new talk called “Multitudes” about the difference between writing application code and writing library code, illustrated by live-coding RSpec.
March 2014:
- Mountain West Ruby Conf 2014 in Salt Lake City on March 20th, 2014. I rewrote my Fluent talk and it turned into something awesome. You can see slides & notes; video is forthcoming.
- Fluent 2014 in San Francisco on March 14th, 2014. I did a new talk, based on an idea from GoGaRuCo 2013, called Unpacking Technical Decisions. For slides, see MWRC, above.
October 2013
- The All Your Base Conf in Oxford, UK, on October 18th, 2013. My talk was “Switching Data Stores: A Postmodern Comedy.” You can see my slides, but AFAICT the video has not yet been posted. I also wrote a blog post based on this presentation.
- I was a featured participant in Rogue Rails in Ashland, OR, on October 26th. This was an open space conference.
September 2013
- The Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco on September 20th, 2013. My talk was “Why Hasn’t Ruby Won?”, about how we evaluate languages and frameworks. You can watch the video and see my slides.
August 2013
- She Codes in Mountain View, California. My talk was called “Sarah’s Incomplete and Mostly Wrong Guide To Working With Men.” You can see my slides with notes, but I haven’t found a video.
July 2013
- Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin, Texas. My talk was called “The End of Fun.” You can watch the video and see my slides.
May 2013
- Fluent in San Francisco, CA, on May 30th. I did a talk based on my RubyConf 2012 keynote called “More Than Good Design.”
April 2013
- Mountain West Ruby Conf in Salt Lake City, Utah. My talk was called “Work, Play, and Code.” You can watch the video and see my slides.
March 2013
- Ruby on Ales in Bend, Oregon. My talk was called “The End of Fun.” You can watch the video, but I can’t find slides…??
November 2012
- RubyConf in Denver, Colorado. I did a keynote called “The Insufficiency of Good Design.” You can watch the video and see my slides.
September 2012
- Golden Gate Ruby Conference, San Francisco, California. I gave a 10-minute mini-talk (with no slides) about touring the city of Singapore with Matz. You can watch the video (I’m third of three).
May 2012
- Fluent in San Francisco, CA, on May 29th. I taught a workshop on Backbone.js called “Backbone.js: Basics & Beyond.”
April 2012
- RailsConf in Austin, Texas. My talk was “Using Backbone.js With Rails.” You can watch the video and see my slides.
September 2011
- RubyConf in New Orleans, Louisiana. I gave a talk called “MongoDB to MySQL: The How And The Why,” about Diaspora converting all their data from MongoDB to MySQL after spending 8 months in production. You can watch the video. I redid this talk in October 2013 for All Your Base Conf (slides), and then wrote a blog post about it.
May 2011
- Farmhouse Conf, Hollywood, California. I told a story about how programming made me an extrovert. There were no slides, but you can watch the video.
April 2011
- Red Dot Ruby Conference in Singapore on April 21st. I taught an intro to Ruby class.
September 2010
- Golden Gate Ruby Conference, September 17th-18th, San Francisco. “Ruby APIs for NoSQL: Polyglot Persistence.” You can watch the video and see my slides.
August 2010
- Ruby Kaigi, August 27th-29th, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. “Feels Like Ruby” – how be happier when you write Javascript. Slides here. Video here (starts out in Japanese, but the technical part is in English). I also ran a half-day pair programming cultural exchange in which Japanese and non-Japanese programmers came together and communicated via Ruby – it was awesome.
June 2010
- RailsConf, June 9th. I gave a talk called Beyond (No)SQL. You can find slides here.
May 2010
- NYC Ruby Workshop, May 20th and 21st. I taught!
February 2010
- SCALE 8x, February 19th. I presented “Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community Got to 18%” at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) miniconf. I wrote an initial blog post about it where you can see the slides and download the audio.
- LA Ruby Conf, February 20th. I presented an updated version of my RubyConf talk, “Indoctrinating the Next Generation: Teaching Ruby to Kids.” I’ve posted the slides and some further resources. You can also watch the video.
January 2010
- Catalyst Conference, January 26th. I moderated a panel of impressive technical women at noon, on the topic of “Curious About Coding & Developing: Developing Creativity & Building a Business.” (All the sessions started with “Curious About X” where X is one of the high-level tasks involved in running a tech business.) Since the audience was mostly non-technical, we focused on how folks without a CS degree could become programmers.
- She’s Geeky, January 29-31, Mountain View. I did several sessions. On Friday I did one on how to get more women into your technical community. On Saturday I did one called “Code Rocks! How to become a programmer even if you’re totally new,” in which we spent most of the time disambiguating all the different programming languages and frameworks, and talking about what each one is good for. Got a lot of positive feedback on that one – I mean, from the outside, how are you supposed to tell the difference between C, C++, C#, and Objective C? Also on Saturday I did a session with Anna and Jen-Mei on pair programming, which was a lot of fun.
November 2009
October 2009
May 2009
