Speaking
Six conference talks and three podcast conversations, from Nairobi in 2019 to Poznan in 2024. Every page here has the date, the venue, what I actually said and a still from the recording. The recurring subjects are building software under pressure, instrumenting it so you can find out what went wrong and growing a technology community from five people in a WhatsApp group.
If you are programming a conference or a meetup and want one of these, or something new, get in touch.
19 to 20 May 2023 · Chattanooga, Tennessee
Aviation runs 22 million flights a year, has about 22 accidents and knows exactly what happened in every one of them. I spend most of this talk on Kenya Airways 507 and the orange box that outlived the aircraft, then ask why our industry cannot do the same.
19 to 20 October 2023 · Estrel Berlin, Germany
Elixir Kenya went from five people in a WhatsApp group to a conference. I explain how, using the rules of hospitality I grew up with and end on why my co-speaker was not in the room.
7 to 8 October 2020 · Online
A keynote with Linda Achieng on Nailinda, an emergency hospital finder built over USSD after a friend died in Nairobi traffic, plus three other Elixir systems built out of Kisumu.
14 February 2024 · Poznan, Poland and online
Rewind to the smallest possible process, then build a server by hand in Livebook until the GenServer becomes the obvious next step. Includes the bottleneck I once built myself without noticing.
11 to 12 August 2022 · Online
A conversation with a Clojure developer about runtimes, bytecode, the JVM and the BEAM, working out why neither of our languages had to be written six times for six operating systems.
25 to 27 July 2019 · iHub, Nairobi, Kenya
The journey a line of code takes from the moment somebody types it to the moment it runs on a thousand servers and every human agreement it has to survive on the way.
9 June 2023
Recorded days after GigCity Elixir. Teaching Elixir by turning a room full of people into a Phoenix plug, building Elixir Kenya on sheer consistency and why I keep embedding in other companies' codebases.
6 January 2022
How the Elixir Kenya community was built meetup by meetup, what ElixirConf Africa set off elsewhere on the continent and why the travel arithmetic keeps it virtual.
12 December 2023
Recorded live in Kakamega and almost none of it is about software. A village primary school with no windows, learning maths in Dholuo, being punished for speaking it and the first computer I ever saw.
Let's figure out what is actually broken.