Talks, podcast conversations, and technical writing about software development and engineering teams.
LinkedIn · July 21, 2026
Checking an embedding-based idealism score for Google's careers pages from 2000 to 2025 against a blind comparison tournament judged by Claude. Where the two disagreed, the score turned out to blur…
Read more →LinkedIn · July 14, 2026
How I validated an LLM's categorization of careers-page language against my own coding, using Krippendorff's alpha to measure agreement beyond chance and treating disagreements as a signal about…
Read more →Seattle Design Systems · Seattle, WA · June 5, 2024
Charts often end up outside a team's design system, even when the rest of the interface uses shared components. I talked about how to bring them in, drawing on dashboard work and my experience…
Read more →Professional Technical Interviewee with Taylor Dorsett · December 7, 2022
I joined Taylor Dorsett to talk about my career path, engineering leadership, and the skills we use in interviews and in our everyday work.
Read more →DevReach · Boston, MA · September 11, 2022
A difficult consulting engagement during the pandemic led me to research resilience at work. In this talk, I looked at what helps teams recover and what support people need when things go wrong.
Read more →Formidable Blog · November 4, 2021
Part two of the fellowship series—using the Canvas API with Victory, trade-offs vs SVG, and the experimental victory-canvas package for performant charts in React.
Read more →Formidable Blog · October 27, 2021
Part one of a Formidable fellowship on data viz performance—how an overloaded main thread showed up in a real client dashboard, and what web vitals, frame rate, and rendering choices taught me about…
Read more →Formidable Blog · December 10, 2020
Originally published on the Formidable blog, this piece is about reviewing code with intention—framing feedback as risk, asking calibrated questions, and building trust on the team. Still how I think…
Read more →Reactathon · December 9, 2020
I borrowed Marie Kondo's approach to tidying to talk about refactoring React components. We looked at when to refactor, how to test behavior, and how to make small changes that help your team…
Read more →React Podcast · February 20, 2020
I joined React Podcast to talk about refactoring components, testing behavior, and making changes a little at a time so a refactor stays manageable.
Read more →React Round Up · January 29, 2020
A conversation on React Round Up about state management and how the way we design components affects the rest of an application.
Read more →React Conf · Las Vegas, NV · October 24, 2019
I gave this talk at React Conf in 2019, when hooks, Context, and Redux gave us plenty of options for managing state. I wanted to help people understand what each was good for and decide what made…
Read more →Fullstack JS London · July 12, 2019
A talk about building React components that other engineers can understand and extend. I looked at why component design still matters as our tools change.
Read more →Fullstack JS London · July 12, 2019
A workshop on React and TypeScript state management patterns, with a companion repository so people could try them out and take the examples back to work.
Read more →8th Light · November 20, 2018
A follow-up on render props—using React 16.3 Context to share alert state without prop drilling, and how I think about Context versus Redux for small slices of global UI state.
Read more →Chicago JS Camp; RVA JavaScript · September 22, 2018
A talk I gave at local JavaScript events about the fundamentals I return to when I'm working in an unfamiliar codebase or learning a new framework.
Read more →8th Light · August 30, 2018
How dependency inversion shows up in React—extracting shared alert state with render props so views stay testable and are not locked to one alert component.
Read more →8th Light · July 18, 2017
An interview with Chicago camp coordinator Jessi Chartier on App Camp for Girls— the first Midwest site, what a week of iOS camp looks like, and why role models matter when girls are deciding whether…
Read more →8th Light · May 22, 2017
From my early years at 8th Light—a plain-language walk through Strategy and Decorator with TypeScript examples, written for developers who learn patterns by solving problems first and names second.
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