Speaking
I've been giving conference talks for about as long as this blog has existed. My favorite subjects tend to be the unglamorous ones: what happens to software (and businesses, and open source projects) after the shiny new smell wears off. Turns out there's a lot to say about the "after" part. Someone's got to.
Organizing an event? Skip ahead to invite me, or scroll on for the highlights.
Upcoming
Keynote at Rails World 2026
I'll be delivering a keynote at Rails World 2026 in Austin. Twenty-plus years into this Rails thing and they're still letting me on stage, which I appreciate. Come say hello if you'll be there.
Selected Talks
Prepare to Tack: Steering Rails Apps Out of Technical Debt
You can't sail directly into the wind, and you can't pause a business for eighteen months to rewrite the app. This talk borrows from sailing to make the case for changing course on long-lived Rails applications in a series of deliberate, survivable maneuvers instead of one dramatic one.
The Rails Features We Loved, Lost, and Laughed At
A tour through two decades of Rails features... the ones we miss, the ones we pretend never happened, and the ones that quietly shaped how we all work. Delivered at the final RailsConf, so the nostalgia was doing some heavy lifting.
Oh My Zsh: 15 Years of CLI Innovation
The story of how a messy little shell config I shared with a few coworkers became one of the most widely used developer tools in the world. Still feels a little absurd to say out loud. Fifteen years of maintaining it has taught me plenty about community, defaults, and why "good enough for my coworkers" is an underrated product strategy.
Panel Hosting & Moderation
Somewhere between hosting Maintainable and On Rails, interviewing people became a weekly habit. Panels are the live version of that: keeping the conversation moving, drawing out the quieter voices, and knowing when to get out of the way. I'm happy to be invited to host yours. A few examples:
Rails Core AMA
Moderating an ask-me-anything with members of the Rails Core team at the first Rails World.
Ruby & Rails: A Chat with Maintainers
A conversation with maintainers from across the Ruby and Rails ecosystems about the mostly-invisible work of keeping the tools we all depend on moving forward.
Rails Foundation AMA
Hosting an ask-me-anything panel with the Rails Foundation in São Paulo.
Topics I'd Love to Speak About
Beyond the videos above, here's the territory I know well enough to have opinions about. If one of these fits your event, let's talk.
- Ruby on Rails: I picked up Rails back when it felt like a secret handshake and have been building with it (and blogging about it, right here) since 2005. Running a Rails consultancy in this community for two decades gives you a long view of the framework that survives hype cycles.
- Starting and running a business for nearly 25 years: I founded Planet Argon in 2002 and have kept it going through recessions, framework wars, a pandemic, and whatever we're calling this current era. No exit, no funding rounds... just a business that keeps working.
- Maintaining open source projects: 15+ years of stewarding Oh My Zsh and its community of thousands of contributors. Mostly lessons about what happens after a project accidentally succeeds.
- Client services: building client relationships that last a decade, learning to say no, and running a consultancy that people actually want to work with (and at).
- Internship programs: designing internships that are genuinely valuable for the intern and the company, not just cheap labor with a nicer name.
- Music and band operations: playing in and managing a band teaches you more about creative collaboration, logistics, and shipping on a deadline than most software projects do.
Then & Now
My first conference talk was at Canada on Rails in Vancouver, the first-ever Ruby on Rails conference, back when most of us only knew each other from IRC and were genuinely delighted to get invited to speak... and to finally spend time together in real life. Still at it.
Invite Me to Speak
Keynotes, conference talks, panel hosting, podcast appearances... if you're organizing something and think I'd be a good fit, tell me a bit about your event and your audience. I'll get back to you.
Need background for a speaker intro? GitHub's ReadME Project wrote a profile on me that tells the Oh My Zsh story better than I usually do.