I’ve given the following prepared talks at conferences and meetups and am available to present them or other topics at your conference, meetup, or to your coworkers. Please contact me if you are interested.

Cultivating a Code Review Culture

Code reviews are not about catching bugs. Modern code reviews are about socialization, learning, and teaching.

How can you get the most out of a peer’s code review and how can you review code without being seen as overly critical? Reviewing code and writing easily reviewed features are skills that will make you a better developer and a better teammate.

I feel strongly that being a part of a strong code review culture continues to make me a better developer each day. My goal with this talk is to give each of you the tools to get more from the code reviews you receive and have more impact with the reviews you leave for others, yielding your own strong code review culture.

In Relentless Pursuit of REST

The oft-cited benefits of REST tend to revolve around data access via API, but in this talk we’ll look at how a laser-like focus on the language of resources in your application can lead to better, more maintainable code.

RESTful architecture can narrow the responsibilities of your Rails controllers and make follow-on refactorings more natural. In this talk, you’ll learn to refactor code to follow RESTful principles and to identify the positive impact those changes have throughout your application stack.

Up & Down Again: A Migration’s Tale

You run rake db:migrate and rake db:schema:load regularly, but what do they actually do? How does rake db:rollback automatically reverse migrations and why can’t it reverse all of them? How can you teach these tasks new tricks to support additional database constructs?

We’ll answer all of this and more as we explore the world of schema management in Rails. You will leave this talk with a deep understanding of how Rails manages schema, a better idea of its pitfalls, and ready to bend it to your will.