Talks
I've had the pleasure of delivering a few dozen technical talks across the country. Here are my favorites.
How Building a Guitar Made Me a Better Programmer
Abstract: In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I built an electric guitar. I chose the project to keep myself busy, and I learned something: programming and luthiery have a lot in common. In this talk, I narrate the build, from unboxing to first strums. I share the lessons I learned over the months, and how they echoed hard-won insights I accumulated over almost ten years of writing code. Programmers of every experience level will leave this talk reflecting on the professional value of their hobbies and inspired to build their guitar, whatever that means to them.
Format Your Elixir Code Now
Abstract: Elixir master now contains a formatter that automatically formats your code to match a community style. Which might lead you to ask: Why should I use it? How do I set it up? What is it going to do to my code? Wonder no more! In this talk, we’ll seek answers to these questions. We’ll locate Elixir’s moment in the history of this idea, review the best arguments for and against autoformatting, and witness how it changes a real OSS Elixir/Phoenix application. Elixir mixologists of every experience level will leave this talk with a better understanding of this important tool, and a deeper grasp of the persistent debate around code style.
Observing Change: A Gold Master Test in Practice
Abstract: Tests try to observe change. But are some systems too big to observe them all? What if we need to test a function with a very complex output? In this talk, we'll explore a Gold Master test– a special test for evaluating complicated legacy systems. We'll look at how this test takes an input, such as a production database, runs it through a transformative function, and then compares the output to an approved version of the output. Testers of every experience level will leave this talk with a new technique for evaluating complex environments, and a broader conception of what a test can be.
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