Talks

Daniel is actively seeking opportunities to speak at Tech Conferences or meetups. Subjects range from code methodologies and readability to specific technologies. Below are some examples of previous talks.

Readable Code - Available without Prescription

This talk tells the story of a revolution in the world of linguistics and how we can apply it to software development. Everyone agrees on the importance of readable code, but no-one can agree on how to write it. There are many conflicting rules out there, and they are all opinionated and arbitrary.

Grammar is also full of rules, and not all rules are the same. “Prescriptive” rules are hard to follow. “Descriptive” rules are intuitive. With the help of Shakespeare, Noam Chomsky and some little green men, we will learn the dangers of prescriptive rules, and discover howreadable.com, an online scientific experiment that can help us write readable code.

Slides available on Speaker deck

The Nitty Gitty - demystifying git

People treat Git like it's a car, but really it's more like a skateboard. In this talk I attempt to demystify git by looking at how Git works under the hood. We look at the basics of Git, its building blocks, its branch model and how to manipulate its history.

This talk was presented online as part of a series of lunchtime tech talks

Slides available on Speaker deck

Readable Code - Available without Prescription

Grammar is all about rules, but not all rules are the same. This talk tells the story of a revolution in the world of linguistics and how we can apply it to software development.

With the help of Shakespeare, Noam Chomsky and some little green men, we will learn the dangers of prescriptive rules, and discover how an amateur online scientific experiment could help us write readable code.

Slides available on Speaker deck

The Nitty Gitty

Git is not complicated, but it is complex (and confusing). In this talk, I explain the basic building blocks of git: commits, blobs, trees and refs. I then build up, past branches and merges to remotes and re-bases in an attempt to demystify the tool we all rely on.

Slides available on Speaker deck

Useable, Grammatical and Readable Code

As software developers, we all know that we need to make our code more readable - but how exactly? There is not a lot of literature out there on the subject, and what there is can be very dogmatic and contradictory. In this talk, I attempt to tackle the issue by learning from the worlds of Linguistics and UX, which have successfully solved similar problems. I present the initial findings from my readability experiment at howreadable.com.

Slides available on Speaker deck

Random Thoughts

How a single line of Ruby code, the flip of a coin and some bad luck lead to an understanding of how random numbers really work, and why fairness isn’t always the best policy.

Watch the video 👀