Catalog of current talks, with links to associated slide decks.

  • Google Cloud - A Guided Tour - There’s a lot to grok in cloud computing, and trying to understand it all can be daunting. In this session I’ll walk you through a guided tour of the Google Cloud, with an emphasis on live demos and practical examples.

  • So Many Notebooks, So Little Time - Notebooks are awesome. Perhaps you’ve used them work or school. But one problem is there are so many. Just at Google we have Colab, Kaggle Notebooks, and Cloud AI Platform Notebooks. So which should you use? The answer, as usual, is “it depends”. This session will summarize your options and try to help you choose the best notebook services and tools for your needs.

  • Google Cloud for Data Science- In this session I’ll take you on a guided tour of the Google Cloud, with an emphasis on tools and services for Data Scientists.

  • What I Learned Processing 10TB of Wikipedia Pageviews- In addition to providing the richest corpus of general knowledge ever published, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes detailed page view analytics, freely available to everyone. In this session I’ll explain how, using only Cloud and serverless tools, I built a robust big data processing pipeline and some associated visualization tools to make the underlying information accessible to everyone. I’ll also share some lessons I learned along the way.

  • Build your own bit.ly - Have you ever wanted your own private link shortener? This session will cover how I built a simple yet powerful personal link shortener service using Cloud Run and Firestore, with live demos and lessons I learned along the way.

  • Machine Learning and the Google Cloud - In this session, I’ll provide some background on Machine Learning, how it works, how it’s being used at Google, and how you can use it now to solve real world problems. Then we’ll work on a lab exercise (so bring your laptop!). Together we’ll see how to train and execute a deep neural network to recognize handwritten digits at better 99% accuracy. I’ll finish with a bunch of demos of ways you can use Machine Learning in the Google Cloud.

  • How the Internet Works - This talk provides a lesson on a topic I think all students, regardless of major, should know something about: the Internet, where it came from, how it works, and some tools to better understand what’s going on under the hood.

  • My Journey - I get paid to solve puzzles, which is my dream job. Primarily intended for students and others interested in career planning, this talk summarizes some things I’ve learned along my 35 year journey in computing and software development, concluding with some career and life advice.

  • Building Codelabs the Google Way - What are Google Codelabs and why should you care? This talk will explain how we author and serve codelabs at Google and how you can too with our open source tools. We’ll also cover best practices for interactive tutorials and other good tools in this space, such as Cloud Shell, Jupyter & Colab, Observables, and repl.it.

  • Solving by Software - This talk reviews some challenging math problems and shows how they can be solved numerically, using moderately simple computer programs. Along the way, we’ll see how to simulate the problems in software, discover some surprising results, and learn a bit of Python. All programs will be made available after the talk in an interactive notebook you can run yourself.