Speaking

My favorite form of sharing knowledge 📚

I've been lucky enough to be a part of numerous tech communities that have sharing knowledge as a core value. From my start in academia, as a student and a practitioner, my years working in Drupal and Wordpress, and now my time working in the Design System space, there have been many opportunities to share what I've learned.

Below is a collection of my now 33 speaking opportunities. I've seen the northern lights in Reykjavik, spoken at the United Nations in NYC, and checked off 3 of the 8 Ivy League schools plus MIT. I've slowed down a bit as national conferences and local camps reconsider the newly decentralized world of remote work, but I'm always looking for the change to share what I know. Feel free to reach out!

Craft Across: Documentation in Design Systems

This was a panel discussion with the Craft Across speaking series, looking at design system documentation and nascent AI integrations.

Design Systems Aren't Hard. But they are complex. And also hard.

This talk has been an ongoing examination of what I see as the core of design systems. In essence, a design system is nothing more than an agreement of how things are built, and everything else is an artifact of this agreement.

The Digital Speakeasy: Secure and Anonymous Access to Your Website

This talk was a technical walkthrough of the most unique agency project I ever worked on. A large publishing client wanted a proof of concept Tor interface to their Drupal website, which gave me a great deep dive into security and privacy on the open web.

Opening the Black Box: Becoming a Better Developer Through Debugging

I used this talk as a way to explore structured debugging techniques, a skill I've found lacking in professional developers, whether they have a fancy computer science degree or attended View Source Community College. While this was my most frequently given talk, every time it was a bit different, and without fail at least one audience member would come up afterwards to tell me they learned something useful.

Nearly Headless Drupal

In 2015, frontend Javascript frameworks like React and Vue were becoming increasingly popular, decoupling frontend code from a backend CMS was a growing trend. I was working at a Drupal agency that had worked on several of these projects, and learned many hard lessons along the way. This talk presented a proof of concept Drupal 8 architecture for embedding Javascript frontend code directly inside of the Drupal codebase, finding a middle ground that preserved the many benefits of Drupal while giving access to the benefits of frontend Javascript frameworks.

DNS: What Do All These Letters Mean?!?!?!

This was a joint presentation with Ian Carrico, one of the smartest developers I've had the opportunity to work with. We provided a deep dive into the history of routing on the internet, and the numerous arcane types of DNS records that make everything work on the modern web. We used a near lethal amount of animated gifs while making sure people understood how often the problem really is DNS. We tried to give them the tools to try and fix those gnarly problems without breaking a sweat.

The Top Ten Development Lessons They Didn't Teach You In School

As a self taught developer, it came as a surprise in my first professional jobs just how similar my development blind spots were to my coworkers with formal software development education. That led me to create this talk, which covered a handful of the real world lessons I learned, from technical topics like version control to online and offline community opportunities.

Remodeling Antique Plumbing With Modern Tools

When I started working as a developer at a university, I didn't quite appreciate how much archaeology would be involved in the work. Thanks to limited budgets, no where is the ethos of "if it works, don't touch it" more apparent. I spent most of my time updating and improving as much code as I could, in an attempt to make future changes faster and safer. This talk was an overview of these many techniques I picked up along the way.

Days of Future Past: A Brief History of the Internet

This was an academic talk, my last given at the University of Incarnate Word as part of their Convergent Media master class series. I presented a rough outline of the history of the internet, from the pre dot-com days all the way through web 1.0 and 2.0. It included a look at the good and the bad of the internet and the growing attention economy, and methods the young undergraduates could employ to make their experiences online more positive.

Yet Another Hours Module

This campus user's group presentation was my first time talking about professional work. I spoke about a custom module I created to display up to date library hours for each of our branches. Rather than a straightforward technical talk, however, I took the opportunity to outline a framework for collaborating on and off campus using tools like GitHub and Drupal specific social platforms like groups.drupal.org.

A Fool Proof Three Step Path to Unlimited Viral Internet Success!!

This was an academic talk, given at the University of Incarnate Word as part of their Convergent Media master class series. In the earliest days of the creator economy, I explored the blueprint of success in online content, and presented this to a group of ahead of the curve undergraduates who already wanted YouTube on their future business cards.

Pardon My Paranoia: Personal Privacy and the Economics of Startups

This was an academic talk, given at the University of Incarnate Word as part of their Convergent Media master class series. I discussed the growing field of surveillance technology on the internet, both as a cultural exploration of internet society and a warning for the young undergraduates in the program.