The Truth of The Thing

A talk on conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, while discussing mistakes I’ve made.

Slides at Speakerdeck.

The Arrival of a Train

Creativity, innovation, mash-ups, and science fiction writers… as a lens on lessons from the software industry.

Slides at Speakerdeck.

Ledgers - When would you even

I delivered this talk at SAP Inside Track Berlin in September 2018. The audience was mostly enterprise developers, almost all of them specifically working with SAP as a platform.

Given how many companies I’ve seen flirting with the idea of distributed ledgers, I thought it would be useful to give people an idea of which cases I see as being a good fit for them, to give them a leg up the next time it enters the discussion.

Slides at Speakerdeck.

Remember the rubber hose

I delivered Remember The Rubber Hose, a talk on privacy and distributed applications, at DappCon Berlin 2018. Skipping the introduction and going straight to the beef…

Slides at Speakerdeck.

Stories we tell ourselves

Last week I had the privilege to speak at infiniTIFF Summit, a part of the Transylvanian Film Festival dealing with technology, storytelling and experimental narratives.

I wrote Stories We Tell Ourselves for the summit. Below is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave.

Slides at speakerdeck.

It's about the curry

I got invited to speak at Monkigras 2018, a superb conference on software, technology and craft. This year’s theme was “Sustaining Craft”. I wrote and delivered It’s about the curry - you’ll find a (close enough) transcript below.

Slides at Speakerdeck.

Fast is not enough

I’ve been advising a startup on the data transformation space. As part of this, we re-wrote the core engine in Clojure. The new version is, at the worst case, 16 times as fast in the same hardware, and in some cases over 200 times faster. And it does it with a fraction of the lines of code.

We did this in under 3 months of part-time work. We couldn’t focus our entire attention on it, as we had other concerns as well - I was involved with general team and management tasks, and the second developer was helping on other internal projects as well. To further raise the bar: we had to keep it functionality-compatible with the current version, so I had to get acquainted with the existing feature set, and it was the other developer’s first Clojure project.

Clojure made our lives so much easier. But this is not a post about why Clojure is cool.

Learning Through Mentoring

On Wednesday, April 26, I gave a talk at Webit 2017 in Sofia about mentoring and movies. The audio unfortunately came out like it was recorded through two tin cans connected by rusty barbed wire. I write these things as effectively a long speech, so my original notes should work as a transcript.

Update: Here’s the video from CodeMotion Berlin 2017.

Interruptions: A User's Manual

Interruptions are one of the best ways to squander time and money, but the value chain is not always obvious. This handy guide will help you make the case for why you should be interrupting your developers (nay, any employee!) regularly.

Be Transparent

This is something of an open letter to team leads and managers out there: you need to be as transparent with your team as you are legally and contractually allowed to.