Speaking
I've given a number of technical talks over the years on Node.js, Ruby, DevOps, data engineering, and lately AI agents and MCP. If you'd like me to speak at your event, guest on your podcast, or join a panel, get in touch. I take a few of these a year and I'm happy to consider more.
Featured Talks
Tools! — A History of Agents Doing Stuff
AI Agents SF #9: Past, Present, and Future — December, 2025
How agents escaped the chat box and gained access to hundreds of MCP servers, the patterns emerging for keeping them safe, and where things are heading next — with risky live demos. Followed by a panel on the past, present, and future of AI Agents alongside Erik Meijer (Normal Computing), Vincent Koc, and Allie Jones.
MCP After Dark: Live Demo of MongoDB × Arcade
SF Tech Week (Arcade.dev HQ) — October, 2025
A live demo of the MongoDB integration with Arcade, co-presented with Anaiya R (Senior Technical Evangelist, MongoDB), at Arcade.dev's SF Tech Week event. The night also featured a panel on the next generation of products built on MCP with Nate Barbettini (Arcade), Max Gerber (Stytch), David Garnitz (Yapify), and Apoorva Joshi (MongoDB), moderated by Gabriela de Queiroz.
AI in the Data Stack: From Dashboards to Agents
Arcade × Airbyte Webinar — August, 2025
A conversation with Alex Girard (Airbyte) about AI security in the modern data stack, landing on a mental model that changes everything: your LLM is just another user. We dig into the patterns and pitfalls of letting agents touch real data systems.
Design Principles for ELT Database Destinations
move(data) — December, 2023
The session will address issues such as data type errors, schema changes, and data accessibility. Attendees will learn about Airbyte's innovative approach to ensuring easy-to-query tables, decoupling sync errors from data errors, and enhancing overall data observability.
git push your data stack with Airbyte, Airflow and dbt
Airflow Summit — May, 2022
Treat your data stack like a software project. Co-presented with Marcos Marx (Airbyte), this session walks through using Git, Airflow, and dbt to manage Airbyte connections as code — so the people who build your pipelines can ship them with the same workflow they use for everything else.
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Let the Robot Publish to NPM
CascadiaJS — September, 2020
As professional developers, we /probably/ don't deploy code directly to production and we /usually/ test things first. There's a whole world of tools and best practices like Git Flow, Continuous Integration, and Review Apps to help us build and deploy our apps and websites... but what about the developer tools we use every day? This talk will focus on how to parallel some of these same best-practices when making developer tools and frameworks. Together we will build a CI/CD pipeline for publishing to packages to NPM.
Using Next.JS to build Static Dynamic Websites… and never pay for font-end hosting again!
SeattleJS — September, 2019
This talk was inspired by a group of students learning to code in Seattle who were being taught tools like React and Angular, but struggling to learn how to deploy their sites using modern methods. Specifically, how to set up CI/CD (Continuous Integration + Continuous Deployment) and HTTPS.
Earlier talks (2015–2016)
Want me to speak?
If you're organizing a conference, meetup, podcast, or panel and any of the above looks relevant, I'd love to hear from you: /contact. I'm especially interested in talks on AI agents, MCP, framework design, and the engineering-leadership side of building developer tools.