~ $ cd talks && cat README.md
Twenty-one years
of standing up
and explaining.
The archive holds more than sixty decks between 2013 and 2024, and about forty occasions I can date and name. The early ones were written as repositories, so they could be read and run, and they are still on GitHub: GruntJS, Promises, JS & Patterns, AngularJS for designers. Most of the rest were written for a room.
The one I am proudest of, and never put on a CV
On 21 June 2016 I moderated a public Q&A with Miško Hevery, who created AngularJS, at the FIB, the computing faculty of the UPC in Barcelona. My deck for it is not slides. It is the list of questions: dependency injection, the hierarchical injector, why TypeScript, what the web looks like in five years.
BarcelonaJS and the Barcelona meetups
2013 to 2017 were the years of the meetups. I spoke at BarcelonaJS and helped organise it, and co-organised the WeNode conference in 2014. In 2022 and 2023 I went back to it, twice.
- 2013-05
- GruntJS, BarcelonaJS.
- 2013-09
- Promises, BarcelonaJS — promises against callbacks, when that was the argument.
- 2014-05-25
- JS & Patterns, BarcelonaJS. Given again a year later.
- 2016-01-29/31
- Three talks across one weekend at the first AngularCamp Barcelona — an un-conference backed by Google Developers, born out of the AngularBeers meetup: Angular Community and API Decisions, MVC: the Model, the great forgotten, and Modules in Angular 2.
- 2016-03 and 2016-07
- MVS: MVC in Angular, twice, the second time with exercises.
- 2016-06
- The Bowling Game Kata, twice in a fortnight. It is still here.
- 2016-11 → 2017-12
- Testing, three times, each in a different room: what, how, why? at the Legacy Code Rocks meetup; from the company to the university and back, for the FIB's alumni and the COEINF; and company, university and professionalism, at the UAB.
- 2017-03-17
- Jornades de l'Institut Bernat el Ferrer, Molins de Rei — a secondary school. The history of software engineering from Dijkstra in 1968 to Agile in 2001, TDD with a calculator, and how to get into university.
- 2022-10-25
- TDD is not a stupid idea, it's brilliant, BarcelonaJS — an open meetup, hosted in the Travelport office, with two of my former students in the audience.
- 2023-04-25
- Redux and Domain-Driven Design, BarcelonaJS, again in the Travelport office — how much the two have in common, and what an implementation gains by taking the design principles they share from both.
Before that, the conferences
- 2005
- IPDPS, Denver. First author and speaker on Optimizing NANOS OpenMP for the IBM Cyclops multithreaded architecture, with co-authors from IBM T.J. Watson.
- 2006
- Co-organiser of the 7th IEEE/ACM Grid Computing Conference, Barcelona.
- 2007
- HiPEAC industrial workshop at IBM Haifa, on the Cell simulator.
- 2011
- GbR, Münster. First author and speaker on parallel graph matching on GPGPUs — Springer LNCS 6658.
- 2012
- Co-organiser of the graph-database track at FOSDEM.
Inside companies, 2017–2023
Training weeks on JavaScript, React and Redux, run twice, in Barcelona and in Denver. Brown bags and TAST sessions. Sessions on TDD and BDD for teams in two countries, one of which someone recorded and passed around.
Since 2022: algorithms, for people who do not write them
Data, algorithms and generative AI, for neighbours, families and teachers — the audience that has to make decisions about all three and was never given the vocabulary. Since 2024 mostly with Aixeca el cap, a platform for a responsible use of screens, of which I am a member.
It began a year earlier, in front of my own profession.
- 2021-11-26
- Realitats ètiques d'avui i demà a les professions informàtiques, a round table at La Lul·liana 2021, the yearly celebration of COEINF, the college of computer engineers of Catalonia. I was the developer, beside a sociologist, a CIO and a lawyer. I spoke of the six months I had spent in the pilot of GitHub Copilot, and how fast it had changed; of software that has killed people, and the oath Robert C. Martin asks programmers to take; and of TDD as a discipline. Asked at the end who is responsible for the code a machine writes, I said the programmer: whoever accepts the change, and with the test written first, knows what they accepted. The college's account; the video from my first turn, and that answer.
- 2022-10-15
- Algorismes i Intel·ligència Artificial, influència en la vida quotidiana — the opening talk of the XXII Fòrum TIC Social, the open-air evening that Llefi@net, the citizens' network of Llefià, has held in Plaça Trafalgar in Badalona every summer since 2000. The slides and their account of the evening are on llefia.org.
- 2024-07-06
- Impacte social de la Intel·ligència Artificial, the same forum two summers on, in conversation with Ariel Guersenzvaig and Xavier Vinaixa — and the talk that followed, on screens at school, whose slides I wrote with Marina Gispert. Documents and video.
- 2025-02-05
- Els nostres fills no són un experiment, invited to III Jornada. L'educació a debat, at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The session is on the university's channel.
- 2025 → 2026
- Vols una galeta? — Sabadell, Barcelona, Altafulla, Sant Celoni, Teià, el Masnou. It grew from 125 slides to 188, and then I cut it to 54, which took eight drafts of the script and is the version I would give again.
- 2026-03-27
- Qui crIA els teus fills?, Escolàpies, el Masnou. Commissioned and paid for by the parents' association — the only one anybody has ever paid me for. They then recommended me to the town council, which is how the last one happened.