Who are your favorite speakers?

Hi there

We're currently in the process of planning a developer summit for our team and looking for a speaker to come spend some time with us. Unfortunately for me, I'm having trouble thinking of some names so I'd like to hear from the community who some of your favorite speakers are.

We're hoping to have someone give a talk on some more general development (language agnostic) topics like writing clean code, working with teams, or even in specific areas of technology like how and why to use the blockchain.

All suggestions welcomed!

Thanks!

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I always think Charity Majors kills it. Every talk/keynote is so unique and different from the other ones, and livens up the room.

[Marcelo Alves 🐙]

Great talk! I'll definitely suggest her and check out the rest of her talks!

[Gunnar Gissel]

In no particular order:

• Adam Bien gives a heck of a demo and has deep, deep knowledge of Java
• Ward Cunningham is pretty interesting; he's got that spirit of the open internet
• Heidi Waterhouse gives a heck of a talk. I've mostly seen her talk on documentation and representation in tech, but they've been great.
• Andrew Clay Shafer is very lively, and has interesting opinions on devops
• Brad Frost can talk your ear off on why you should spend time on design, and how to do it
• Kelsey Hightower is a top notch speaker who does Kubernetes demos that seem like wizardry, but goes beyond the tech
• Sandi Metz gave a talk that made a lot of things about refactoring, oop and coding click for me - I was impressed

[Marcelo Alves 🐙]

Great suggestions! Sandi Metz was one of the first I thought of but she's booked the week we're planning the summit 😢

[Pine Apple]

Love Sandi Metz :) I only watched her videos, never been in person, but was very good!

[Chris Raser]

Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) has been killing it lately with talks/thoughts/twitter threads on exactly what you're talking about.

[Marcelo Alves 🐙]

I've been following Sarah forever and I can't believe she didn't come to mind first! You're right, her thoughts and topics are exactly what we're looking for. Thanks!

[Vincenzo]

definitely Gary Hockin youtube.com/watch?v=RH74_sFjqzs
Saw his talk live at PHPNW2016 and was amazing

[Bartek Lipinski]

I'm just gonna leave this here ("Wat" by Gary Bernhardt)

destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

[Yuval Itzchakov]

Bartosz Milewski (bartoszmilewski.com/). His Category Theory lectures are a real treat (youtube.com/user/DrBartosz/videos).

[Madusudanan.B.N]

I highly recommend Venkat Subramaniam - twitter.com/venkat_s

Check out some of his talks.

• Twelve Ways to Make Code Suck Less
• Core Design Principles for Software Developers

and a lot more.

His website - agiledeveloper.com/

[André König]

Definitely André Staltz. His talks are informative and pretty funny. You should consider inviting him not just because of learning new things but also to entertain the crowd (even when he is doing UI engineering mainly; he is also committed to Scuttlebutt which is a peer-to-peer social network movement).

[Ben Halpern]

Yeah, André is great. Here's a podcast episode where he talks about Scuttlebutt

[Nitish Dayal]

I'm always blown away by Lin Clark's talks. Not always language-agnostic, but Lin is one of the best at taking complex ideas and breaking them down into digest-able chunks. WebAssembly and React Fiber would be unknowns for me if it weren't for her talks on the subjects.

[Jonathan Boudreau]

Off the top of my head:

• Rick Hickey has good talks on general design.
• Ashley Williams has some talks that I watched to dip my feet into Rust programming.
• Kevlin Henny