Presentations

2024

Doing "the most important thing" is a trap
This talk is little about why you need to say 'No' to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough.
Why You Should Write More Documentation
Documentation. Collectively, we should all write more of it. But why don't we, and why should we write more?

Scaling Your Influence Through Documentation
Without writing lines of code, how do you - as an Individual Contributor - become someone who influences the opinions of multiple cohorts of people at once?
The Staff Engineer's Path
A Brown Bag session giving an overview of The Staff Engineer's Path, the book by Tanya Reilly.

Tales from Prod: Surviving a DDOS
What is a DDoS, and what does it look like to be on the receiving end of one? Who does this, why, and how? And what did we learn from our event in April?

Delivering JS at Scale
It's all about confidence, and the systems, processes, technologies and best practices that remove the fear that comes when working with a large, customer-impacting codebase, and allows us to continue delivering new features to customers without breaking anything.
Sharing code with 200 Engineers
React helps encapsulate Front End tech into components, but how do you go about sharing those components across your organisation - for everyone to use, as easily as they would open-source components?
Inner Source Ecosystems
Open Source is a great idea for benefitting from the publicly available shared efforts of others, but what about sharing private code within your organisation?
Guerilla TypeScript
Think you want to use TypeScript, but for one reason or another you’re not ready to make the leap into using .ts files?

Make Your Tools Work
Specifically, make your tools work for you.
Colours: A lightning Talk ⚡️
I find colours fascinating, and I write code that goes into websites, so there’s bound to be a natural intersection between those two…
Fractal and Drupal
A Brown Bag session, discussing a recent project combining the principles of the Atomic Design principles from Fractal with the Drupal Content Management System.
Headless Solutions with Drupal & React
Exploring the ways that we can pair Drupal with the latest cool kid on the block, React.

Web Fonts FTW
Making web fonts with Grunt
Vagrant and Docker
An introductory presentation to a new-fangled thing called 'Virtualisation' and how Vagrant and Docker are tools which could represent the future of development for our organisation.
The Magic of Charts
Data Visualisation in JavaScript
Telling Tales and Solving Crimes with New Relic
A Brown Bag presentation covering two real-world examples of how the New Relic APM tool helps us to detect and rapidly resolve issues in production.
ES6; WTF?
An overview of the ES6 specification, including answers to the questions: what actually is ECMAScript? And why should we care? And how do we actually go about using it?

What I learned at the Edge Conference
A Brown Bag presentation overview of the 2015 London Edge Conference.

Git 101: Force-sensitive to Jedi padawan
What is Git? What does it do, how does it work, how does it fit into my workflow? If you've ever wondered about the answers to any of those things, this session is designed for you, my friend.
Responsive Images in 10 minutes
A 10 minute ripping yarn through the world of responsive images.
Fork me!
Getting into GitHub, for fun, kudos and all that jazz.

Grunt: An introductory training deck
A brief talk introducing Grunt as a task management option for the development team.
The Holy Grail: Cross-browser JavaScript Unit Testing with Code Coverage Metrics
Why would you want to do Unit Testing in Javascript? How do you actually do it? How can you run it in Browsers? How about CI environments? And how can you monitor coverage and identify weaknesses?
Agile Partners
Lessons learnt and tips and tricks for successfully adapting Agency Development to Agile Ways of Working, and building performant working relationships in a B2B environment.
Javascript Testing with Node.js, Testacular & Jasmine
For the last year or so I've been working on large scale (and complicated) Javascript applications, and one of the big deficiencies that exposed was the historically poor support for unit testable, metric-supported Javascript - at least within our own company. And so, for the last half year my 'hobby' has been improving our Javascript development, testing, build and deployment processes.

The Graph API
An Introduction to and overview of the Facebook Graph API, including the data available, how to fetch it, how to work with permissions, and how to use it to find and create data in Facebook with it.