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…

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