Rob's Talks

All my public talks, pitifully disorganized. Some are in PDF, some in LibreOffice, some in Reveal.js.

Table of Contents

Talks

• Bleed for Speed: Rapid Prototyping in Django: A summary of tips and tricks I've picked up from four years of active hackathoning using the Django web framework for Python.* Boxee for Hackers: An introduction to development on the now discontinued Boxee platform.
• Building High Performance Technical Teams: A rollup talk of some of the things I've learned serving teams of software people over the past ten years in startups.
• Crapping Rainbows with PhoneGap: A fifteen minute look at PhoneGap from a dude who has never used PhoneGap.
• Getting Started With APIs: A primer on web-based APIs for the uninitiated. Aims to give the audience an overview of some handy hackathon APIs and toolsets for fast integration.
• Hackathons Are For Hacking: Observations on hackathon trends in 2015 from the perspective of a developer that sponsors a whole bunch of them.
• How To Change The World In A Weekend:A ten minute pump-you-up talk on how to perform well at a hackathon, codejam, buildoff, or startup weekend. Delivered from a hackathon veteran, this talk is a fork of "How To Take Second Place At A Hackathon" for events that focus on social good.
• How To Make A Natural Disaster Punkcam: A Hack and Tell 5-minute talk on setting up a webcam to watch a natural disaster with a punk rock soundtrack.
• How To Take Second Place at a Hackathon: A fifteen minute pump-you-up talk on how to perform well at a hackathon, codejam, buildoff, or startup weekend. Tactical advice from a veteran of these types of events on how focus, finish and place well in an intensive limited-time creative competition.
• How to Crush Your Hackathon Demo: A fifteen minute speed pep-talk to help hackathon participants polish their presentations.
• Intro to LimeJS: A brief introduction to this browser game development framework.
• Intro to Programming: An introduction to programming using Scratch for middle schoolers.
• Kicking the Tires of Google App Engine: A 45 minute introduction to Google App Engine. Focusing on Python, this survey of Google's foray into the cloud business introduces developers to the benefits and detriments of the service, discusses recent changes that have great implications to app costs, and reviews code for the webapp, Datastore, Task, and Channel APIs.
• Learn Brogramming the Hard Way: A fifteen-minute comedy routine riffing on the Brogramming meme. Performed as the uber-bro character "Chad," this presentation showcases a framework for improving oneself as a brogrammer called The Brotocol - Grok, Trunk and Live.
• Mobile App Distribution via SMS: A twenty minute presentation showing how Twilio customers are driving awareness and adoption of their mobile apps through SMS.
• Measuring Developer Evangelism: A thirty minute presentation on measuring the effectiveness of your developer outreach program.
• Open Source Television: A thirty minute conceptual talk introducing the Boxee platform to open source enthusiasts.
• Product Oriented Architecture: An argument for a different type of software architecture where all services are built as hardened APIs that can be externalized to customers.
• SMS For Humans: Using NLP and Python To Build Text Interfaces Fat Fingers Can Use: A live coding presentation introducing easy-to-implement use cases that dramatically improve user experiences using natural language processing.
• Twilio Karaoke: A 30 minute live coding presentation that builds a functioning karaoke machine using Twilio SMS, Voice and Client.
• Upgrade Your Toolkit With The Power of Voice: A practical list of easy-to-implement, cheap tools for leveraging voice to acquire more leads and more customers.
• We Were Promised Jetpacks: An Introduction to Android Wear Development: A 30 minute introduction to building an app on Android Wear for intermediate to experienced Android developers.
• Writing Writable APIs the Write Way: An introduction to FluidInfo that ended up getting me a job as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio.
• You Don't Have Time (Not) To Test: A talk advocating for novice developers to learn automated testing early in their programming education.
• Your Execution Year: Pro tips on life after your B round from your 30th employee.

Meta

• Written by Rob Spectre
• Released under GPLv3
• Software is as is - no warranty expressed or implied.