Skip to content

Talks

Speaking has run alongside my software career since 2012. I use talks to make hard-won engineering lessons concrete: what worked, what failed, and which trade-offs survived contact with production.

Speaking topics

My recurring subjects are software architecture, data systems, and operating real applications. That has included Ruby and JRuby, Elixir and Erlang, SQL and document models, deployment and Kubernetes, data visualisation, and the human side of adopting technical systems.

Notable appearances

I spoke at eurucamp 2013 and have been a regular contributor to Berlin’s Ruby and Elixir user groups. Other appearances include up.front, SQL workshops, and the Metabase User Group Berlin, whose first meeting I co-hosted in 2018.

All talks

  1. Privacy by Design

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A practical argument for modelling data boundaries, purpose, retention, and access before implementation makes privacy failures expensive.

  2. PostgreSQL Friends

    Elixir User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A collection of practical PostgreSQL techniques for Elixir developers, building on years of using the database as more than a passive persistence layer.

  3. Agentic RAG with Tilores

    AI Builders · Berlin

    A demonstration of retrieval-augmented generation where an agent can resolve identities and gather better context before composing an answer.

  4. BeyondCorp Overview

    Client Presentation · Online

    A shortlist of Google's BeyondCorp strategy: remove trust from the network perimeter, identify people and devices, externalise services, and evaluate access per request.

  5. Modeling Document Databases

    Elixir User Group Berlin #65 · Berlin

    A brief survey of document database modelling, its advantages, and practical ways to use PostgreSQL as a powerful document store.

  6. Ahoi! Complex applications on Kubernetes

    Elixir User Group Berlin #60 · Berlin

    A follow-up to Elixir Deployment about using Kubernetes resources and operators to run applications with more moving parts than a stateless web service.

  7. Flow Based Programming in 2 minutes

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A lightning-fast explanation of applications built as processes that communicate through information packets and explicit connections.

  8. Metabase UG, November 2018

    Metabase User Group Berlin · Berlin

    An introduction to the November edition of the Metabase User Group Berlin and the community around practical, accessible business intelligence.

  9. Flow Based Programming in Elixir

    Elixir User Group Berlin #52 · Berlin

    An application model based on processes, information packets, and externally defined connections, demonstrated through the Pipette library for Elixir.

  10. Configuration in Elixir

    Elixir User Group Berlin #50 · Berlin

    A small talk about configuration boundaries in Elixir and the GetConf library built to make environment-backed settings explicit.

  11. Cloudflare Edge Side Includes

    Titel Media Engineering · Berlin

    A small presentation about edge-side includes and moving selected page-composition work closer to readers without giving up origin-controlled content.

  13. Adele: Inter-service Messaging

    Elixir User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A work story about ETL microservices, distributed Erlang, and an intentionally romantic experiment that discovers callable modules across connected nodes.

  14. Elixir Deployment

    Elixir User Group Berlin #42 · Berlin

    An opinionated comparison of Elixir hosting and release options, followed by a practical deployment rather than an abstract checklist.

  15. NIFs and C-Nodes

    Elixir User Group Berlin #40 · Berlin

    A comparison of two ways to bind native code to Erlang and Elixir, including their different failure boundaries, messaging models, and operational risks.

  16. SQL Workshop Part 1

    SQL Workshop · Berlin

    The first part of a workshop series designed to give application developers and analysts practical confidence with SQL and their existing data.

  17. Constraint Programming

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    An approachable path from brute force to constraint programming, using small Ruby examples, logic puzzles, and the classic amb operator.

  18. Object Constancy in Visualisations

    up.front #59 · Berlin

    A look at object constancy in data visualisation: preserving a reader's mental map while values, positions, and representations change.

  19. MySQL Trickery

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    An operations-focused tour of online MySQL migrations and the Unix tools—such as csplit and pv—that make large changes observable and controllable.

  20. Thread gem

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A small tour of the Thread gem, including how a modified Thread#every can act as a self-updating cache and simple circuit breaker around an external service.

  21. App-to-User Notifications

    Wooga Engineering · Berlin

    A production report from Diamond Dash about adapting notification frequency to individual behaviour and increasing useful traffic without sending every message to every player.

  22. PStore not dead

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A lightning talk about the useful little persistence system already shipped with Ruby, and the problems that do not require a separate database service.

  23. Fish: a shell for the 90s

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A short, enthusiastic comparison of Fish and Bash, with a later caveat about the rough edges that came with daily use at the time.

  24. Cuba Framework

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A tour of Cuba's deliberately tiny surface area and the trade-offs involved in choosing a micro-framework over a larger Ruby web stack.

  25. Bitcoin: Why and How

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A period piece combining a small programmatic wallet demonstration with the broader case for Bitcoin as a currency.

  26. Wrapping Apache HTTPClient

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A practical look at translating Apache HTTPClient into an idiomatic Ruby API while retaining the Java library's concurrency and transport strengths.

  27. Practical Functional Programming in Ruby

    Ruby User Group Berlin · Berlin

    A lightning talk showing how small classifier functions can produce a readable, testable, and composable detection system without abandoning Ruby.

  28. Stateful Application Server in JRuby

    eurucamp 2013 · Berlin

    The constraints, benefits, and operational differences of keeping application state in a JRuby process instead of a traditional database-backed server.

  29. Lightning in the Cloud

    JRuby Conference · Berlin

    A playful detour through atmospheric electricity, different kinds of lightning, and why nearby strikes can be more dangerous than the dramatic direct hit.

  30. Stateful Application Server

    Wooga Engineering · Berlin

    A production report on scaling a JRuby/JVM application up through shared in-memory state and out through static sharding, including deployment and concurrency trade-offs.