Startups often require employees to take on multiple roles, and one such combination is for an engineer to take on product management functions. In this talk, you will learn what a product engineer role looks like, why you should be a product engineer, and how to become one. I will discuss why product engineers are an invaluable asset to an early-stage startup, and how having product engineers result in better products and happier developers. This talk relates my experience over the last eight years in the trenches of early-stage startups, as a founder, and most recently as a product engineer at Coach.me.

Refactoring is a practice that is often overlooked when it comes to CSS. As a result, styles seem to just grow and grow, until no one knows for sure which styles apply where, or whether many rules are still used at all. In this talk, we’ll cover strategies for refactoring CSS using Sass, with a focus on maintainability of code. Topics include code organization, naming, incremental change, and handling special cases such as responsive styles. This talk is based on my experience refactoring thousands of lines of CSS into Sass, in a way that allowed for continuous feature development, as well as supporting multiple layers of responsive styles and device-specific styles.

Building Strong Foundations for Leadership — This is the part 3 of 3 of an edited version of my talk on becoming strong leaders, given at Lead Dev London, June 2018. See here for Part 1, and Part 2. You can be highly productive yourself, and you can grow and develop a great team, but you…

Building Strong Foundations for Leadership — This is the Part 2 of 3 of an edited version of my talk on becoming strong leaders, given at Lead Dev London, June 2018. See here for Part 1, and Part 3. We think of a leader as the person in the front — like a commander leading their…

Building Strong Foundations for Leadership — I had the honor of speaking at The Lead Dev conference in London last week. Lead Dev is one of the best organized conferences I’ve attended. I love that the conference focuses on how we improve engineering as people, not just learning new technology. …

And how learning to sleep made me superhuman — Despite how click-bait-y this title sounds, it is not an exaggeration. In the last six months, my average wake time has been 6:30am—including weekends, holidays, and frequent time zone crossings. To be fair, 6:30am is not that early in the realm of early-birds, called larks, who espouse the miracles of…

Make Meetings More Equitable By Giving Everyone a Chance to Speak — How many times have you sat in a meeting rolling your eyes as a fellow attendee delivered a soliloquy wholly irrelevant to the meeting? Sometimes detours are necessary to provide background information or explore new ideas in a meeting. But often one person dominates the meeting with lengthy tangents, as…

My first year as an un-reformed “runner” — Note: I wrote this in 2013, but didn’t publish it until now, five years and well over another 1000 miles later. I grew up a nerd. A TV stereotype of a nerd complete with glasses, braces, and a wardrobe of hand-me-downs even though I was an only child. Being a…

This talk explores computing’s roots in arts and humanities, and why the divide between science and the arts stunts the development of technology. 2014 SF Bay Area Digital Humanities Meetup Video Youtube