One of the benefits of my previous API Evangelist role was that it gave me the opportunity to stretch my skillset beyond developing code. Public speaking is something that I was once terrified of. While I you probably won’t see me at the next TED talk, speaking has become a lot more enjoyable with practice (even if I still have some filler words to work out, you know, right?)
CHC 2019
In 2019 I gave a talk at the Cerner Health Conference to a technical crowd on developing applications that call HealtheIntent APIs from within Cerner’s Millennium platform. The code samples and presentation are available on Github, though I don’t have a recording of the presentation.
DevCon 2019: Teach Others to be Experts Through Documentation
I also was given the opportunity to talk at Cerner’s internal developer conference on the importance of good documentation. One of my responsibilities as a Developer Evangelist was reviewing API designs and documentation, and so I wanted to lay out what makes documentation good, and why it is so important. I shared the stage with Aaron McGinn who was doing similiar work with Cerner’s FHIR API platform. The theme of the conference was the 80’s, hence the wacky presentation.
DevCon 2020: Take Learning Into Your Own Hands - Build a Homelab
2020 was a weird year for everyone, and while we didn’t have an in-person developer conference, the Cerner events team did manage to pull off a pretty good virtual one. I gave a talk encouraging self-learning, leaning on one of my favorite hobbies homelabbing. The theme for this year was Jurassic Park.
VUSE 2022: Git-ting Beyond Push and Pull
In 2022, I helped my company migrate our main product off of TFVC to Git so that we could change our workflows and deploy more than twice a week. Seen as a resident Git evangelist, I was asked to put together a presentation on Git with Ryan Read for our internal developer conference. We set out with the goal of educating our engineers on how to use Git effectively. But we also wanted to bring more value than most of the “Getting Started with Git” guides on YouTube by going into the internals a bit, as well as going over some best practices. The talk was unfortunately not recorded, but I have attached our presentation below.