Fairfax, Virginia, United States •
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About
I have a gift for explaining complex topics in such a way that they will make sense to people with minimal experience -- and sprinkle lots of humor along the way, to keep people awake and focused.
Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)
Like it says on the tin, it's an introduction to the concepts, workings, and history, of an odd software testing technique called Mutation Testing. I've done this in as short as 22 minutes or as long as an hour and five minutes, might be able to squish the bare bones down to 15 or so, and could probably give about an hour and a half worth listening to. I've done this at Ruby, JavaScript, Erlang/Elixir (BEAM), Python, and many polyglot conferences, and could probably adapt it fairly easily to Python. (Also did it at a C/C++ conference but kept the examples in Ruby.)
Tight Genes: Intro to Genetic Algorithms
Yes, that's right, geneTic, not geneRic. Genetic algorithms are a way to "evolve" solutions to a problem, similar to real-world biological evolution. This often reveals great solutions that humans probably would never have thought of, such as the twisty NASA ST5 spacecraft antenna, developed by a genetic algorithm in 2006! This talk will explain the concept and its terms, and then walk you through some examples.
ACRUMEN: What IS Software Quality Anyway?!
About my ACRUMEN definition of software quality. The bare bones can be squashed down to five minutes, but the usual version, with further exploration of the nuances of each, tips how to achieve them, and sometimes the interplay between them, can go up to well over an hour. I could make it even longer if you want. The concepts are so technology-agnostic, and most of them so understandable to non-techies, that there isn't even any code in the presentation! I have done this at several conferences and a few local tech meetups.
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