Centralization Is A Fragile Thing

This is the original text of a talk I wrote for the Tallinn Digital Summit 2024, which was built around the theme of Securing the Digital Tomorrow.

Supporting the randos

Let’s talk about some things that we as open source creators need to get better at, including supporting other developers ourselves.

(A talk I delivered at at the first CodeDAO meet-up during Berlin Blockchain Week in August 2019, about sustainable open source development).

Slides at Speakerdeck.

Identity, Privacy, and the Edge

Introduction

My goals for this talk are to:

• Give a small taxonomy going into categories and labels that I think are useful when talking about identity;
• Walk you through what a layered conceptual model for identity could be like;
• Talk about the privacy implications for how we go about implementing things;
• Hopefully convince you that the closer to the edge we process things, the better it is for the user, but that the edge does not guarantee privacy (no matter what the Blue Behemoth whose name starts with an F would like people to believe).

Slides at Speakerdeck.

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.

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.