Public Speaking

Me speaking

Don't hesitate to contact me if you'd like me to speak at your conference or user group. I love to share my experience, and even more to learn from others who are passionate about software development.

Topics I typically speak about include:

Want to hear me present on another topic? Just let me know. I am passionate in a wide range of topics related to software development and have even developed expertise and experience in topics that my colleagues consider totally arcane. ;-)

Talks

MountainWest RubyConf 2009 March 13-14, 2009, Salt Lake City, Utah


Download the video (courtesy of confreaks.com)

What The Ruby Craftsman Can Learn From The Smalltalk Master

Abstract: This session highlights some of the most fundamental and timeless best practices described in Kent Beck's book SmallTalk Best Practice Patterns in the context of Ruby development.

The Ruby community has fostered a great pioneering spirit at its core. Rubyists eagerly investigate new tools, approaches and programming techniques to unleash Ruby's full power and expressiveness.

Sometimes however, this pioneering spirit often comes at the expense of learning from previous collective knowledge in the developer community. We do not have to rediscover all classic edge wisdom on our own. There is much to learn from best practices documented by the Smalltalk community which had a very similar dynamic to our own, and which attracted the best programmers of their generation:

I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby. Kent Beck

SpeakerConf 2009 March 17-19, 2009, Aruba

High ROI Web Acceptance Testing

Abstract: This session shares my field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high Return on Investment for Ruby on Rails applications. I cover innovative best practices and tools to transform a 3 hours web testing suite that is always red into a sub-20 minute passing build that provides quick and accurate feedback while requiring minimal maintenance.

This session covers best practices as well as innovative techniques and tools that you can put in place. Achieve your own success story and address the shortcomings of traditional web acceptance testing including:

I discuss how to address these issues by leveraging tools such as RSpec, selenium-client, DeepTest and Selenium Grid while implementing innovative best practices such as:

I explain the rationale of each best practice in detail, describe how to implement it and provide concrete code examples.

Voices That Matters 2008, Professional Ruby Conference Nov 17-20, 2008, Boston

Rock Solid Ruby Deployment

Abstract: Building, deploying, and maintaining large-scale Ruby on Rails applications is a lot of fun. However, it typically also involves overcoming a variety of vexing problems, some of which prove difficult to investigate using just the traditional Ruby stack. For these abstruse problems, the standard Ruby development tricks quickly become inadequate. This is especially true during the deployment phase for applications. This talk introduces and demonstrates some key system diagnostic tools and techniques in the context of Ruby on Rails development. Some are already well-documented in the Addison-Wesley Short Cut, Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, while others are new and remain relatively undocumented.

Paris on Rails 2008 Dec 1st, 2008, Paris

Tests d'Acceptance Web à Forte Valeur Ajoutée pour Ruby on Rails (French)

Audio (MP3 bittorrent) | Audio (MP3) | Transparents
Télécharger la présentation (courtesy of parisonrails.org)

Résumé de la présentation: Une suite de tests d'acceptance web qui finit en 10 minutes en trouvant de vrais bugs et vous laisse le temps d'aller à la plage: mais si, c'est possible!

Les tests d'acceptance Web pour Ruby on Rails, qu'ils utilisent Selenium, Watir ou WebDriver, sont bien souvent une source de frustration constante. Qui plus est, leur valeur ajoutée diminue de façon exponentielle avec le temps : leur coût de maintenance est très élevé et la plupart du temps les bugs se trouvent bien plus rapidement en testant l'application de façon manuelle qu'en analysant les résultats de tests automatisés qui prennent plusieurs heures et sont constamment dans le rouge. Pas très "agile"...autant jeter ces tests aux orties!

Mais en réalité cela tient bien souvent à une mauvaise approche du problème. Cette présentation introduit une approche, des pratiques et des outils innovateurs que ThoughtWorks utilise avec grand succès sur le terrain pour développer des tests d'acceptance Web à forte valeur ajoutée. Nous avons ainsi transformé des suites de tests qui mobilisaient une personne à temps plein, restaient constamment dans le rouge, et prenaient plus de 3 heures... en des suites de tests qui finissent en 10 minutes, restent dans le vert et requièrent un effort de maintenance minimal!

Nous reviendrons sur le pourquoi et le comment de chacune de ces techniques en les illustrant par des exemples concrets et bien sûr une bonne dose de code: "Ruby is beautiful"!

Latin America Rails Summit 2008 October 15-16th, São Paulo, Brazil

High ROI Web Acceptance Testing

Abstract: This session shares my field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high Return on Investment for Ruby on Rails applications. I cover innovative best practices and tools to transform a 3 hours web testing suite that is always red into a sub-20 minute passing build that provides quick and accurate feedback while requiring minimal maintenance.

This session covers best practices as well as innovative techniques and tools that you can put in place. Achieve your own success story and address the shortcomings of traditional web acceptance testing including:

I discuss how to address these issues by leveraging tools such as RSpec, selenium-client, DeepTest and Selenium Grid while implementing innovative best practices such as:

I explain the rationale of each best practice in detail, describe how to implement it and provide concrete code examples.

Agile 2008 Aug 4-8, 2008, Toronto

Maintain High Quality Web Applications with a Green Web Acceptance Build that Runs Under 10 minutes

Abstract: In the Web 2.0 age, end-to-end web testing provides tremendous feedback on the quality of your Web application. However this feedback cycle is typically quite long and comes at a high maintenance price. This talk shares our field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high return on investment (ROI) for Web applications. As ThoughtWorks consultants, we successfully transformed a 3 hours web testing suite that despite high maintenance efforts was always red, into a passing sub-15 minutes build that provides quick and accurate feedback while requiring minimal maintenance. This session covers best practices and tools that you can put in place to achieve your own success story.

In our experience, attaining high value from traditional acceptance web testing is hard to accomplish mainly because:

We discuss how to address these issues by leveraging tools such as Selenium Grid, while implementing innovative best practices such as:

We explain the rationale of each best practice in detail, describe how to implement it and provide concrete code examples.

Yahoo  QA Conference July 9, 2008, Sunnyvale

Maintain High Quality Web Applications with a High ROI Web Acceptance Build

Abstract: In the Web 2.0 age, end-to-end web testing provides tremendous feedback on the quality of your Web application. However this feedback cycle is typically quite long and comes at a high maintenance price. This talk shares our field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high return on investment (ROI) for Web applications. As ThoughtWorks consultants, we successfully transformed a 3 hours web testing suite that despite high maintenance efforts was always red, into a passing sub-15 minutes build that provides quick and accurate feedback while requiring minimal maintenance. This session covers best practices and tools that you can put in place to achieve your own success story.

In our experience, attaining high value from traditional acceptance web testing is hard to accomplish mainly because:

We discuss how to address these issues by leveraging tools such as Selenium Grid, while implementing innovative best practices such as:

We explain the rationale of each best practice in detail, describe how to implement it and provide concrete code examples.

RailsConf 2008 May 29-June 1, 2008, Portland

What To Do when Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn't Want to Tell You About It

Abstract: Most of the time the Ruby stack gives you a good grasp of what is happening when you experience a problem with a RoR application: you can inspect some objects, raise an exception, launch script/console, add a log message, add a breakpoint, Google it, or… just explain the problem to your nearest coworker.

Occasionally, though, the actual problem is deep at the system level and proves to be more difficult to understand. For these abstruse issues, the standard Ruby development tricks quickly become inadequate. This is especially true during the deployment phase for applications. To alleviate these frustrating moments quickly, it is best to leverage the UNIX platform (whether you are on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or Solaris) and start using the raw power of tools such as DTrace, strace, gdb, lsof, netstat or XRay.

This talk introduces and demonstrates some key system diagnostic tools and techniques in the context of Ruby on Rails development. Some are already well-documented in the Addison-Wesley shortcut, Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, while others are new and lack sufficient documentation for many Rails developers.

MountainWest RubyConf 2008March 28-29, 2008, Salt Lake City

Download the video (courtesy of confreaks.com)

What To Do when Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn't Want to Tell You About It

Abstract: This talk introduces and demonstrates some key system diagnostic tools and techniques in the context of Ruby on Rails development. Some are already well-documented in the Addison-Wesley shortcut, Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, while others are new and lack sufficient documentation for many Rails developers.

Google Selenium User Meetup 2008 — Feb 25, 2008, Mountain View, CA


Official Video on YouTube

Selenium Grid : Web Testing That Doesn't Take Hours!

Abstract: This lightning talk explains the rationale behind Selenium Grid, a tool I created and which transparently distribute your in-browser web application tests on multiple machines. This way you can run your tests in parallel, cutting down the time required for running in-browser test suites.

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