Video & Slides: Metaphors are everywhere: Ideas to Improve software development

Back last year in June of 2022 I gave what’s one of my favorite talks (of myself) at the wonderful conference Code Beam A Coruña. It’s a talk where I take some of my interests – Basketball, fiction writing, game development and trading card games – and look what we can learn about software development from them.

The talk was a major hit at the conference, with way more people than normal coming up to me to thank me about it and to talk about it. The video has been online for 10 months, but I just saw it yesterday and I must admit to watching the full talk. I had forgotten quite some aspects of the talk, so it was educational – even for me. Normally, I never watch my talks back – this seemed worth it.

The audio quality isn’t the best, but I hope you might still enjoy it!

You can also find the talk at speakerdeck, slideshare or as a PDF.

presentationDownload

Abstract

Let’s embark on a journey together – a journey in which we’ll weave together the realms of basketball, fiction writing, game development and trading card games to explore how these seemingly unrelated domains surprisingly intersect with the world of software development, offering fresh perspectives and insights.

Discover how concepts, strategies, and principles from these diverse domains can enhance your software development skills and creativity. Let’s celebrate the power of interdisciplinary thinking, revealing how diverse interests can invigorate your approach to software development.

Slides: Stories in Open Source

Yesterday at RUG::B I tried something I’d never done before: a more personal, story driven talk. And in order to adequately illustrate it and how different Open Source feel to me I also opted paint some very special drawings.

Open Source is something I’ve been doing for longer than people pay me to do programming. I’m immensely passionate about it and it felt like it was some kind of blind spot that I never gave a talk about it so far.

If you know of a conference this talk would be a good fit for, please let me know.

Anyhow, here are the slides to enjoy: Speaker Deck, SlideShare or PDF

Abstract

What’s it like to work on Open Source projects? They’re all the same aren’t they? No, they’re not – the longer I worked on Open Source the more I realize how different the experience is for each one of them. Walk with me through some stories that happened to me in Open Source and let’s see what we can take away.

Slides: Functioning Among Humans (RUG-B)

In a trial run for Heart of Clojure I gave my talk Functioning Among Humans yesterday at RUG::B. It covers topics very close to my heart and is a talk I wanted to give forever. It’s sort of a “best of” soft/social/people skills that I learned going back all the way to high school and that are useful to me in every day life.

If you happened to have seen the talk, please feel free to reach out to me with feedback as I still want to improve upon it for future versions.

Slides can be viewed here, on speaker deck, slideshare or PDF

Abstract

In the development world most people are striving for technical excellence: better code, faster run times, more convenient interfaces, better databases… But is that really what helps us create better software?

In the end software development is done by groups of people creating products together. To do that communication and collaboration are essential. You can be the best programmer ever, but if you can’t efficiently work with others what good does it do you?

This talk will introduce you to relevant, easy to grasp concepts of collaboration and communication as well as give you food for thought.

Video & Slides: Do You Need That Validation? Let Me Call You Back About It

I had a wonderful time at Ruby On Ice! I gave a talk, that I loved to prepare to formulate the ideas the right way. You’ll see it focuses a lot on the problems, that’s intentional because if we’re not clear on the problems what good is a solution?

You can find the video along with awesome sketch notes on the Ruby on Ice homepage.

Anyhow, here are the slides: speakerdeck slideshare PDF

(in case you wonder why the first slide is a beer, the talk was given on Sunday Morning as the first talk after the party – welcoming people back was essential as I was a bit afraid not many would show up but they did!)

Abstract

Rails apps start nice and cute. Fast forward a year and business logic and view logic are entangled in our validations and callbacks – getting in our way at every turn. Wasn’t this supposed to be easy?

Let’s explore different approaches to improve the situation and untangle the web.

Slides: Where do Rubyists go?

I gave my first ever keynote yesterday at Ruby on Ice, which was a lot of fun. A lot of the talk is based on my “Where do Rubyists go?”-survey but also researching and looking into languages. The talk looks into what programming languages Ruby developers learn for work or in their free time, what the major features of those languages are and how that compares to Ruby. What does it tell us about Ruby and our community?

Slides can be viewed here or on speakerdeck, slideshare or PDF

Abstract

Many Rubyists branch out and take a look at other languages. What are similarities between those languages and ruby? What are differences? How does Ruby influence these languages?

Videos & Slides: It’s About the Humans, Stupid (Lighting)

 

When I was at the excellent Pivorak meetup I had  the chance to give an “inspirtational” lightning talk. So I took this chance and prepared a lightning talk version of a talk I’ve been submitting to a lot of conferences but always got rejected. The talk is about “soft” skills, not the usual “hard” skills talks that you might be used to 🙂

The topic is very close to my heart as applications aren’t developed in a vacuum – they are developed with and for humans. I hope you enjoy it and that at some point I submit it to the “right” conference which will accept that type of talk 🙂

You can see the slides here or take a look at them at speakerdeck, slideshare or PDF.

Abstract

In the development world most people are striving for technical excellence: better code, faster run times, more convenient interfaces, better databases, faster deployments… But is that really what makes us better at developing software?

In the end software development is done by groups of people creating products together. To do that communication and collaboration between humans is essential – you can be the best programmer ever, if you can’t efficiently work with others what good does it do you?

This talk will give you a primer and food for further thought.

 

 

Video & Slides: How Fast is it Really? Benchmarking in Practice (Ruby)

My slides & video from visiting the excellent WRUG (Warsaw Ruby Users Group). The talk is a variation of the similarly named elixir talk, but it is ever evolving and here more focused on Ruby. It covers mostly how to setup and run good benchmarks, traps you can fall into and tools you should use.

You can also have a look at the slides right here or at speakerdeck, slideshare or PDF.

Abstract

“What’s the fastest way of doing this?” – you might ask yourself during development. Sure, you can guess what’s fastest or how long something will take, but do you know? How long does it take to sort a list of 1 Million elements? Are tail-recursive functions always the fastest?

Benchmarking is here to answer these questions. However, there are many pitfalls around setting up a good benchmark and interpreting the results. This talk will guide you through, introduce best practices and show you some surprising benchmarking results along the way.

edit: If you’re interested there’s another iteration of this talk that I gave at the pivorakmeetup

Slides: Code, Comments, Concepts, Comprehension – Conclusion?

The following is the first part of my visit to Warsaw in April (sorry for the super late post!). As part of the visit, I also visited Visuality and spent an evening there giving a presentation and discussing the topics afterwards for a long time. We capped it off some board games 😉 I had a great time and the discussions were super interesting.

The talk is a reworked old goldie (“Code is read many more times than written” / “Optimizing for Readability”) and is about readable code and keeping readable code. It’s evolved as I evolve – I learn new things, assign differing importance to different topics and discover entirely new important topicss.

You can view the slides here or on speakerdeck, slideshare or PDF.

 

Video: What did AlphaGo do to beat the strongest human Go player?

The publishing/video partner of Full Stack Fest was amazingly fast in publishing the video. Kudos to them! So after publishing the slides here goes the video!

If you want to have the slides, here they are ( or via links PDF, Speakerdeck, Slideshare):

In case you want to see it live, the talk will be up again at Codemotion Berlin.

Abstract

This year AlphaGo shocked the  world by decisively beating the strongest human Go player, Lee Sedol. An accomplishment that wasn’t expected for years to come. How did AlphaGo do this? What algorithms did it use? What advances in AI made it possible? This talk will briefly introduce the game of Go, followed by the techniques and algorithms used by AlphaGo to answer these questions.

PS: Yes, Lee Sedol probably wasn’t THE STRONGEST human player – more like Top 3 or Top 5 at the time of the game (most people would probably call Ke Jie the strongest player at the moment). Lee Sedol is the dominant of the last decade though, and when the match was announced nobody on the computer-go mailing list complained about the opponent, so I just assumed he was the strongest or among the strongest but only found out after submitting the talk 🙂 . Plus, sadly “How did AlphaGo beat one of the top 5 Go Players” isn’t as catchy as a title.