Tech (and Tech-Adjacent) Talks

Presentations I have given, most recent first.

Equity Compensation in Startups: intro & braindump

Essential learnings from my decades in startups, distilled. Things I wish I had known!

Incremental Non-Design: Fighting Entropy like Sisyphus (PyGotham 2014)

All code has a design, whether deliberate or not. If you don't think about it, the odds of keeping code well-designed code are nil. This is especially challenging as software evolves over time. How and why does code get worse as it ages?

This talk focuses on a particularly common anti-pattern - overuse of inheritance; how it gets to be so common; and walks through some improvements to an existing design.

Spam Control On the Web (PyGotham 2012)

For the "I'm On a Boat!" edition of PyGotham, I did this talk about implementing flexible anti-spam defenses on websites.

OpenBlock: hyperlocal django (PyGotham 2011)

Not my favorite performance, but it's still a cool project. Watch for the comically gigantic regex (slide 36).

REST is Easy (Pycon 2008)

My first public talk that didn't totally suck. Remember when REST was a grand idea that people theorized about? Good times. This talk attempted to explain the ideas behind REST and why they were important.

  • Slides (PDF) - I recommend starting at page 47: This actually includes the talk twice - first just the slides, then the slides with speaker's notes.
  • Code samples (tarball) - Tarball of all the code examples mentioned in the text. Example server requires paste, wsgiref (in standard library as of 2.5), and selector. Example client requires restclient and lxml.

Zope 2 Application Development (Pycon 2005)

The slides are fairly readable alone, and may be interesting for historical purposes (it's not exactly a popular platform anymore). Mercifully there is no video: it was my first talk and I was very under-rehearsed!