I've been lucky enough that conferences keep making the mistake that I have something interesting to talk about — here's a sample of some of my previous talks.

Leading a distributed team of introverts

Most management today is focused on activities for extroverts — but what tools can we use to lead teams that consist mostly of introverts?

Slides from this presentation given at UX Week 2014.

How do you build great software?

A bit of a rambling talk I gave at Brooklyn Beta about the importance of your surroundings. This talk covers some of GitHub’s approach to company development and the importance of the tools you use.

Slides from this presentation given at Brooklyn Beta 2013.

Building an army of robots

There’s nothing quite like writing code to automate a task. It’s like bottled satisfaction for coders. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to GitHub’s army of robots. Robots to test our code and deploy. Robots to open doors. Robots to play our music. Robots to record videos of presenters. Robots to serve us beer.

Robots improve quality of life. Robots remove the separation between programmers and designers. They replace managers and large QA departments. They ensure GitHub continues to be a company full of hackers.

Slides from this presentation given at Valio Con 2012 and Nordic Ruby 2012.

A better future with KSS

What is KSS, and where did it come from? I wrote this talk to introduce the audience to some of the best parts of KSS, and how it came to be.

Video and slides from this presentation given at Webshaped 2012.

Choose Your Adventure!

Designers can’t be developers and companies who build web apps can’t build desktop apps. Well, maybe in 1997 — but it’s 2012. Things done changed. It’s time to focus on building amazing companies full of fantastic people. Build amazing apps that people love to use. Screw false specialization, iOS shops, and mobile-only products. We’re people building apps for other people to use on technofantastical devices of tomorrow.

Slides from this presentation given at Úll April 28, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland.

D.R.E.A.M - How the Wu-Tang taught me to design

No slides from this one — a brief history of how I got into design by way of poisonous monsters, why I think it’s important to align revenue with customer happiness, why cash rules everything around design, and how to become a better designer because of it.

Given at Funconf II - 2011 at Lismore Castle, Ireland.

Responsive web design from the future

pushState. replaceState. Hashbangs. AJAX. PJAX. Beets. Bears. Battlestar Galactica.

Responsive web design is about a lot more than the size of your screen. This talk is about about how GitHub handles links, the url bar, partial page updates, and explains why I think the HTML5 history API is the most important thing to happen to front end development since Firebug.

Slides & notes from this presentation given at Twitter HQ May 31, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.

Design hacks for the pragmatic minded

A lot of developers think they either can’t or don’t need to design. But that’s just a myth — everyone can benefit from a few simple design concepts. Learn some simple design hacks you can apply to your documentation, presentations and products to make them just a little bit prettier.

Slides & notes from this presentation given at Ruby on Ales 2011 in Bend, OR.

Documentation is freaking awesome

I have a confession: I love documentation — and I don’t just mean code comments. I mean documentation of every form. I want to introduce you to the breadth of documentation styles and forms. I want to show you how to produce beautiful generated documentation. I want to explain what makes an awesome README. How to build an amazing marketing website for your library. I want to gush about why I think writing TomDoc is going to make you write better code.

Ruby is such an expressive language that your code can end up looking like anything you can imagine. Documentation is paramount in helping others understand why and how they should be using your code.

Slides & notes from this presentation given at MagicRuby 2011 in Orlando, FL.