Videos & Slides: Stories in Open Source

Back last year in June 2023 I was lucky to speak at lambda days 2023 about one of my favorite topics: Open Source! And it’s not just Open Source, but it’s my story in Open Source and my journey throughout Open Source – so far. As such, it’s by far the most personal talk I’ve ever given. So, within the talk you won’t just learn about how to run Open Source projects, how to contribute to Open Source projects and how to get better at something – but you’ll also learn about where I went for ERASMUS, my connection to Ukraine and the health situation of bunnies. I swear it makes sense in context!

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

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: Elixir, Your Monolith and You (Elixir Berlin Version)

I was supposed to give this talk at ElixirConf.Eu, but sadly fell ill. These are the slides (still titled alpha-1) that I used to give it Elixir Berlin which was met with a great reception. Which is also why I was so looking forward to give it again and have it recorded… Anyhow, if you saw the talk and want to go through the slides again or you were looking forward to the slides – here they are.

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

Abstract

Elixir is great, so clearly we’ll all rewrite our applications in Elixir. Mostly, you can’t and shouldn’t do that. This presentation will show you another path. You’ll see how at Liefery, we started with small steps instead of rewriting everything. This allowed us to reap the benefits earlier and get comfortable before getting deeper into it. We’ll examine in detail the tactics we used to create two Elixir apps for new requirements, and how we integrated them with our existing Rails code base.

Join us on our tale of adopting Elixir and Phoenix and see what we learned, what we loved, and what bumps we hit along the road

edit: slightly updated version from devday.io – PDF slideshare

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?

Slides: Stop Guessing and Start Measuring (Poly-Version)

Hello from the amazing Polyconf! I just gave my Stop Guessing and Start Measuring talk and if you are thinking “why do you post the slides of this SO MANY TIMES”, well the first one was an Elixir version, then a Ruby + Elixir version and now we are at a Poly version. The slides are mostly different and I’d say about ~50% of them are new. New topics covered include:

• MJIT – what’s wrong with the benchmarks – versus TruffleRuby
• JavaScript!
• other nice adjustments

The all important video isn’t in the PDF export but you can see a big part of it on Instagram.

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

Abstract

“What’s the fastest way of doing this?” – you might ask yourself during development. Sure, you can guess, your intuition might be correct – but how do you know? Benchmarking is here to give you the answers, but there are many pitfalls in setting up a good benchmark and analyzing the results. This talk will guide you through, introduce best practices, and surprise you with some unexpected benchmarking results. You didn’t think that the order of arguments could influence its performance…or did you?

 

 

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