Talks & more

Talks, Workshops, Podcasts, and more!

AWS Summit Toronto

June 14, 2023

Serverless developers! If you’ve ever been stung by a cold start and want to know what you can do about it - wonder no more!

I gave a talk called “Thawing your AWS Lambda Cold Starts” at AWS Summit Toronto! The talk covers a numer of tools you can use to profile cold starts, and a few techniques to optimize them.

You can watch it now, on YouTube:


Ready, Set, Cloud!

March 24, 2023

I sat down with AWS Serverless Hero Allen Helton to help answer the question: “Why is Serverless Observability so hard?”. We covered a range of topics including continuous profilers, distributed tracing, and how to monitor end to end latency in data pipelines.

Serverless is taking the world by storm. Despite there being countless blogs, tutorials, and recommended best practices around serverless, there’s shockingly little material on observability. Why? It’s hard! Join AJ and Allen as they talk about the difficulties of observing a serverless application, dive into the differences between KPIs and infrastructure metrics, what the future holds for observability, and more.

Listen here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.


Serverless Workshop, Dash 2022

October 2022

My good friend and colleague Maxime David developed a hands-on workshop to help developers learn how to build a Serverless GitHub Bot deployed using AWS Lambda, SNS, SQS, and API Gateway.

You can find the code in the example repository.


The State of Serverless with The CloudCast

August 24, 2022

After helping out with Datadog’s annual State of Serverless Report, I was invited onto The CloudCast to share some highlights.

The Cloudcast is the industry’s leading, independent Cloud Computing podcast. Since 2011, co-hosts Aaron Delp & Brian Gracely have interviewed technology and business leaders that are shaping the future of computing.

You can listen to the episode here.


Constant Variables

June 7, 2022

Bryson and I also were interviewed for the Constant Variables podcast. To quote the hosts, Constant Variables is

Focused on helping non-technical people become more comfortable with the nerdy jargon related to mobile software development, we break down technical topics to make them less complex and more accessible

You can listen to it here


Serverless MN

2021-2022

Througout 2021-2022, I spent a fair amount of time organizing speakers for ServerlessMN. You can find a number of excellent talks by guest speakers on our YouTube channel, including:


Getting Started with Serverless Framework

July 29, 2019

Before joining Serverless MN as a co-organizer, I gave a talk! No recording, but the abstract is buried here somewhere. I’m more than happy to answer any questions about the content though, just reach out!


Screaming in the Cloud

September 18, 2019

Corey Quinn and I sat down to chat about Serverless Inc, the creators of the Serverless Framework, and some of the projects I worked on there.

You can listen to it here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.


AWS re:Invent

November 2018

We’ve been using Elasticsearch at Sportsengine for quite some time. This year, I had the unique opportunity to give a talk with Senior Platform Operations Manager Andy Fleener at Amazon’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Our presentation covers the application and underlying architecture of SportsEngine HQ. Specifically Directory, Powerpay, and Rostering - which is based on Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service. AWS re:Invent is an annual 5-day event which hosted over 50,000 attendees this year. More than 880 total people attended our talk, which has been made available on YouTube