Speaker Kit

Building Software That Heals as Fast as It Breaks

Frontend engineers can ship excellent UIs while knowing very little about availability, SLOs, or delivery metrics. Many teams are set up that way, and it works, right up until reliability issues, slow rollbacks, or missed incidents start limiting impact and trust. This talk is about expanding the frontend role beyond the UI and into the system it runs inside. Not to turn frontend engineers into SREs, but to build enough systems awareness to make better tradeoffs. We’ll look at resilience as a delivery mindset, and how practices like atomic changes, trunk-based development, feature flags, and automated rollbacks directly influence availability and recovery, even when failures originate elsewhere. We’ll connect these practices to real constraints like SLOs and DORA metrics, and show why failure tolerance is contextual, from regulated systems where mistakes are expensive to product environments where controlled failure is acceptable. The goal is simple: help frontend engineers understand where their work fits in the system, so they can ship faster without increasing risk, make safer changes, and increase their leverage within a team.

Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts: Optimizing UX in Suboptimal Conditions

This talk breaks down real world data fetching challenges at scale and how to solve them with modern patterns like the BFF layer, granular payload shaping, prefetching, and critical versus optimal queries. We walk through progressively improving an architecture that starts with five parallel client side requests against a bloated API, then move the work to a proxy handler, and finally to a fully optimized TanStack Query setup with server prefetching and resilient fallbacks. All demos were recorded on a long haul flight using in flight WiFi, showing how these patterns behave under real latency, unstable bandwidth, and failure conditions. The goal is to prove that these techniques are not academic. They directly affect reliability, performance, and user experience in harsh environments where debugging, caching strategy, and payload discipline make or break your product.

Delivered 11x

Engineering Without a Safety Net: Where It Works and Where It Hurts

Testing, monitoring, observability. They're rarely urgent, often skipped, and easy to dismiss when things are moving fast. But what's the real cost of deferring them, and how much can you actually get away with? This talk explores the tradeoffs of skipping traditional engineering practices in the name of speed, and what happens when you try to layer them in after a system has already scaled. It's not about dogma or checklists, it's about pragmatism, risk, and timing.

Delivered 3x

It Worked on My Machine: Debugging Without the Screenshot Olympics

Every developer has lived their own version of “it worked on my machine.” Mine involved a client who stayed after a CrossFit class so I could debug a broken payment flow with them, outdoors, on their laptop, armed with blurry WhatsApp screenshots and bug reports that made no sense. I even found myself explaining how to open the browser network tab to someone who’d never seen DevTools. In this talk, I’m bringing that same 2020 app back to life, a weekend React-and-Rails project held together by hope, to see how we’d tackle those same problems today. We’ll look at how modern full-stack session recordings and AI-assisted IDEs turn that chaos into context in a world where we now ship vibe-coded apps faster than ever.

Delivered 1x