Speaking and Talks

From time to time I speak at local user groups and conferences. Here is a list of those talks along with slides and code-samples where available. Most of my talks since 2014 have been given in-house at Amazon and therefore aren't publicly available.

I'm available to give talks on a wide variety of topics from how to use AWS services to a variety of programming topics and DevOps.

  • Autoscaling Improvements for Escalator (KubeCon EU 2019)
  • Hands on DevOps (CodeMash 2014)
  • Devops or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ops Team (PyOhio 2012)
  • Django Precompiler (CodeMash 2012)
  • Unicode, Myth Busted (PyOhio 2010)
  • Introduction to WSGI (CLEPY 2010)
  • Large Scale System Administration (ALUG 2009)
  • Python Abstract Syntax (CLEPY 2009)

Autoscaling Improvements for Escalator

This talk was given at the AWS container summit during KubeCon EU in 2019.

The talk was a brief overview of the state of the art in Kubernetes autoscaling and demonstrated some improvements with the Atlassian Escalator auto-scaler that allowed very rapid acquisition of large fleets of EC2 instances.

Hands on DevOps

This was a full-day workshop given at CodeMash in 2014. My co-presenter was Chris Lako.

This talk was a full-day workshop that lead attendees through setting up and configuring a small VM-based lab using Puppet and Chef.

Devops or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ops Team

This presentation was given at PyOhio in 2012.

Ever since the beginning of the software profession the people who write the software and those who run the systems have been at odds with each other. The Devops movement has sought to reconcile these differences from an operations perspective but to truly succeed developers must take an active role in engineering systems that are operations friendly. This talk is given from the perspective of a developer with an operations background and will introduce the audience to the basic tools that operations teams use to maintain and monitor systems and software. This talk will also cover engineering practices that developers can use to build software that is more operations friendly and easier to maintain and scale.

Django Precompiler

This was a full-day workshop given at CodeMash in 2012. My co-presenters were Dave Stanek and Mike Pirnat.

This was a full-day workshop that lead attendees through the process of getting a basic website up and running with Django and Python. It started with static pages and added forms, models, and administrative functionality over the course of the workshop.

New to web development? Want to check out a new language? Join us in an exploration of Python by way of the Django web framework. Python has been around for over 20 years and has a well-deserved reputation of being easy to learn and very useful for quick prototyping. Django is a web framework written in Python "for perfectionists with deadlines." We'll introduce the Python language and the Django framework through a project that will result in a fully functional, tested site where users can submit proposals and receive feedback. We'll cover some of the neat time-saving applications that ship with Django and finish with a simple read-only JSON/REST API that could be used to power mobile applications. No Python or web development experience is required; we'll provide the HTML, CSS and Javascript so you can focus on server-side development. Bring your laptop and join us for a tour of Python and Django!

Unicode, Myth Busted

This talk was given at PyOhio in 2010. My co-presenter was Len Thomas.

This talk explores Unicode and how to deal with it in Python 2 as well as upcoming improvements in Python 3. The goal of the talk is to introduce the audience to the basics of Unicode as well as how to work with it in Python and how to avoid common errors when handling text programmatically.

Introduction to WSGI

This talk was given to the Cleveland Python Users Group in February 2010.

The talk covers the basics of the WSGI standard for Python.

Large Scale System Administration

This talk was given to the Akron Linux Users group in Fall 2009.

A brief tour of the Python programming language followed by a use-case detailing how we at AG Interactive are using Python to manage a complex Linux deployment of a large search engine. I will introduce some examples of how Python can be used to replace shell scripting and examine why one would choose a programming language like Python over shell scripting. The talk is geared towards people with an intermediate level of Linux experience and a casual knowledge of any programming language.

Python Abstract Syntax

This talk was given to the Cleveland Python Users Group in March 2009.

The talk covers the Abstract Syntax features in Python from their introduction in 2.3 all the way through the current state of AST in 2.6 and 3.0. This is a high-level overview with a couple of interesting use cases for the AST module. The talk covers the module itself and the underlying techniques that are used to generate the AST tree including a short tour of the Python parser.