Keynote-worthy talks (I think?)

As of late, I’ve been doing a number of talks that weren’t so much focused on specific technologies like I’ve done in the past.

Rather, they talk about broader issues (still mostly related to what I do for a living, though), and some conference organisers have approached me after the talk expressing regret that they didn’t put it in front of a bigger audience.

So, just in case: maybe your next conference is looking for a keynote? Here are a few talks I think might be worthy of such a thing. All are approximately 45 minutes long.

Quit Simplifying (slides, video from Config Management Camp 2024) is a talk in which I talk about the ever-increasing complexity of systems, the futility of simplification, and thus the necessity to keep things as simple as possible from the get-go.

Creativity: How we lost it, why that’s bad, and how we get it back (slides, video from PyCon Italia 2023) talks about the value of creativity, its necessity in business, the myriad ways in which contemporary ways of working are detrimental to creativity, and simple and effective measures to foster creativity.

It’s Your Own Damn Fault: Why great people don’t want to work with you addresses hiring challenges in many modern organisations and the way that many of those organisations fail to attract good people by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. This talk I’ve thus far only given in German, and I am currently working on an English version. The slides for the German edition are in this GitHub repository.

No, We Won’t Have a Video Call For That (slides, video from FrOSCon 2020) was a talk I gave at the height of Covid lockdowns in 2020, thinking it was the last time I’ll ever have to do a distributed work talk because surely everyone would have figured it out by now. Little did I know. Not only did the writeup of that talk get slashdotted by Hacker News more than a year later, but it seems that just a few years on, most companies have completely forgotten what they learned during lockdowns. So, if you think your conference benefits from a talk about distributed work that works, maybe an updated reprise of that talk might be helpful.

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Want one of these for your conference? Please feel free to contact me via one of the channels you’ll see just below my mug on the left, or at the top of your screen if you’re reading this in portrait mode.