Presentations
Building With a Software Factory
You already have a software factory: whatever turns ideas and bugs into shipped software. How to find where work piles up, and what's helped me at each stage, from agent hooks and AI review to merge queues.
How to Make Your Coding Agents Do the Right Thing (More Often)
Quality gates for AI-assisted software development — agent hooks, auto-fix linters, pre-commit hooks, CI, custom lint rules, and stop hooks.
AI-Assisted Software Engineering
A tour of AI coding tools as of mid-2025, how I kept an agent on track with Cursor rules and requirements files, and what I'd used it for, from one-off scripts to Rails upgrades.
Learn How to Learn AWS
Why AWS is worth learning, why it's hard to learn (it's wide, deep and changes fast), and how to make a learning plan using certifications, video courses and meetups.
Cumulative Flow Diagram Analysis
Queues, Little's Law and work in process, and how to read a cumulative flow diagram to see where work is waiting.
Testing MEAN Apps With JavaScript
Why (and why not) to write developer tests, and how to test Mongo, Express, Angular and Node code with Mocha, Sinon, Karma and Protractor.
Testing File Operations in Ruby
Ways to test code that touches the file system: rolling your own mocks, MockFS and FakeFS, with the pros and cons of each.
RR for Test Doubles
Concise mocking and stubbing in Ruby with RR (Double Ruby), with examples from a real app.
Making Recommendations with Apache Mahout
How I built a deal recommender with Apache Mahout's Slope One algorithm, and how Mahout can run on Hadoop.
