Talks

Talks and presentations from conferences over the years.

I used to present quite frequently at conferences, both as a representative for my team at SUSE while I was working there but also at various local tech conferences. When the pandemic hit I did try doing some virtual conference presentations, but did not really enjoy it to the same degree. I am thinking about doing video presentations to scratch that itch again, but until I do, these are some talks that are available and still somewhat relevant to watch.

Seven years in Tibet^W^Wat Home

It’s a bit ironic that my last talk (for now) was a 2020 talk about working remotely and dealing with the pandemic, held just as lockdowns started to happen.

This talk was given virtually at FOSS North 2020.

Let’s LISP like it’s 1959

One of my favorite papers in computer science is the original LISP paper by John McCarthy. Written in 1959, it describes something mind-bending: The interpreter for a language in the language that it interprets. If you understand this paper, you understand how computation works.

This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. It was quite successful and got picked up as a LWN article.

Everyone gets a pony!

This talk is either a free horse giveaway, or a talk about a programming language called Pony.

This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA2018) which was held on 22-26 January 2018 in Sydney, Australia.

Package Managers all the way down

This talk focuses on the intersection of two package management philosophies. I have been involved in the process of making software written in the rust programming language available through the openSUSE package management system, and will describe the challenges we have faced and the challenges that still remain for Linux distributions as developers get more and more used to working with language-specific package management systems.

This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2017 which was held in Hobart, Australia.