As a professional speaker, I put a lot of time and effort into my talks. For keynotes, they sometimes take a couple of months. For regular talks, they can take weeks. Regardless of which, I’m proud of the work I’ve done. Below is a curated selection of some of my talks and the background behind them.
Unfortunately, I can’t share any videos of the corporate talks because these are private events, often covered by an NDA.
Where is Generative AI today?
I was invited in early 2024 to speak at a German conference about generative AI. Because it was a small conference and everyone knew who I was, I decided not to go the typical “how to†route. I wanted to confront people’s concerns head on and let people know where we are and where we’re going.
Unfortunately, generative AI has been advancing so rapidly that every time I wrote a slide, it seemed to be out of date shortly after. So I broke the talk down into an introduction and several lightning talks. I think it went well, as evinced by the fact that after the talk, a CEO walked up to me and immediately asked about training his people.
Party Like It’s 19100+eiπ
For the 25th anniversary Perl conference, I was asked to be one of the two keynote speakers, along with Damian Conway . But I had a problem. They wanted me to do an overview of the last 25 years of Perl conferences. Walking through 25 years of these conferences was going to be boring, so I took a different approach.
I also came up with what I humbly submit is the best talk title, ever.
This talk was in Las Vegas.
Searching for Extraterrestrial Life in Our Solar System
Yes, I’m a geek. I love astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life. As it turns out, there’s are tantalizing hints that it might exist in our solar system. Unlikely, but possible. But to get to that point, I had to explain why the problem is hard. This talk was in Finland.
I want to give this talk again because there’s plenty of stuff to update.
OO in the Perl Core
I spent years leading a design team to bring modern object-oriented team to the Perl core. Here’s a short talk about the implications of it. This is a very technical talk and I touch lightly on BASIC, C, Assembler, Java, Prolog, Python, Perl.
This talk was in Toronto, Canada, which was curious. The first time I had ever visited Toronto was about a month prior to this, on an unrelated contract for a client.
When You Don’t Want Agile
I love agile and lean development, but they’re not the same thing. This confusion causes many people to use the wrong project management strategy. This fifty minute talk I gave in Romania explains very clearly what the difference is and why it’s so important.
By the time you’re done, you can probably explain why Scrum is lean, not agile, and what that means for your team.
How to Fake a Database Design
This is a talk that earned me 5 out of 5 stars at OSCON, despite being in a room full of experience database developers (though this version was in Sofia, Bulgaria).
I decided to skip a lot of terminology and just give people a few simple rules to understand how to better design databases.
Raku: The Programming Language You Didn’t Know You Need
This talk was for the 2021 FOSDEM conference, but I had to give it remotely as we were still in lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic.
You’re Killing Managers (Keep It Up)
This is probably my most controversial talk. I don’t think everything stands the test of time, but I’m still quite proud of it.
Fun fact: some of the discussion comparing corporate structure to English Feudalism was based on an old blog post on the Valve Software site. That blog post was written about their in-house economist, Yánis Varoufákis , controversial former finance minister of Greece. I had no idea who he was at the time.
This talk was in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2014.
Note: here’s the old version of this page.