Smart Money Moves for Developers to Build a Seven-Figure Net Worth

In this talk, I'll share my ongoing journey towards building a seven-figure net worth as a software developer, focusing on the practical strategies that have significantly improved my finances, allowing my family to take summers off, slow travel, and work on my own terms. As the son of an immigrant, the concept of wealth building was foreign to me, yet my career in tech offered unexpected opportunities to redefine my financial future – not by choice but by necessity.

I'll detail how leveraging techniques like geoarbitrage, paying-myself-first, and 401(k) optimization has enabled me to leverage my developer salary as a tool for building wealth. This session is about the real, actionable steps you can take to work less for money and more toward financial freedom. Spoiler: there are no secret overnight shortcuts. But neither do you need to sacrifice yourself at the altar of The Hustle. I hope by sharing my experiences and the framework I'm using, you can make more informed financial decisions that align with your life goals, regardless of where you are on your path to financial independence.

Lean React Architecture: Building High-Performance Apps

Should you use CSS-in-JS? What form library is the best? Do you even need Next.js? Redux or React Query? Decisions you make upfront will dictate the end-user experience. React doesn't make this easy, there are a ton of options to consider. If only we had an organized approach to make sense of the chaos...

Lean React Architecture is a strategic framework that provides standard evaluation criteria for component design and app delivery so you can make more informed decisions. Inspired by DDD, Clean Architecture, and SOLID, Lean React provides a systems-based and user-centric approach to architecting React apps. We'll talk about the importance of reducing wasted renders, improving real-user experience, focusing on DevEx, and promoting reuse and flexibility, so you can build lean, efficient React apps.

Everyday AI: Automate Life's Little Details

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, it's easy to get caught up in applying it to large-scale business applications. But what about the small-scale personal tasks that eat into our time? In this session, you'll learn ways no-code and low-code AI workflows can streamline and enhance our day-to-day experiences. Want your weekly Instacart groceries ordered seamlessly? Or maybe you're looking to ask your budget spreadsheet questions? I've got real-world examples using Zapier and Azure OpenAI to inspire you. We're moving beyond the hype and into hands-on demonstrations to bring AI's practical benefits to the forefront. Whether you've worked with AI already or are still noping out, I'll show you some delightful ways AI can subtly yet significantly improve your daily life without compromising your privacy.

Money is Undefined or Not an Object: A Personal Finance Story

This is a story about how one tweet turned my finances around. You see, I was financially illiterate. I was making a six-figure income but didn't understand how to manage it until 9 years into my career. No one ever explained money to me. No one told me that if I saved half my income out of college I’d be retiring at age 38. And if they had, I’m not sure I would have listened. I was contributing to my 401k at work but had no idea how investing worked. I was on auto-pilot. Until my daughter was born and I was about to double the cost of daycare. I felt like I had lost control. Then a random tweet changed. My. Life. In this talk, I'll take you through my financial journey, introduce a life optimization framework, show you how investing works, debug taxes, whisper secrets about HSAs and 457bs, and share how I've implemented these patterns and practices to refactor my life. In less than an hour, you will know everything I wish I knew 10 years ago laid out in plain language.

Given at MDC 2021 and user groups. 50 minute session. Designed for a developer audience.

Designing a Flexible UI Architecture with React and GraphQL

If your application suffers from hard-to-debug UI state, complex client-side business rules, and has trouble scaling to meet your performance needs you might be tearing your hair out. In this session I will share how we shifted the way we thought about our application using a 3 step process from the ground up. I’ll show you how we built a declarative “schema-driven UI” engine built on React and GraphQL that could manage business complexity and still scale to meet future business requirements.

I'll share our approach, some challenges we faced and advice for your own applications so you can design your own declarative schema-driven UI architecture that fits your business needs. Don’t fret if you don’t use React or GraphQL because this pattern can be introduced into any framework you might be using.

First given at NDC MN 2019 and in Oct at Minnesota Developer Conference 2019

Building Scalable, Maintainable Apps Using TypeScript and React

Building real-world, maintainable applications is hard in JavaScript which is why there’s such a rich ecosystem of frameworks and libraries to help make that easier. React.js is a framework for building components that helps make your front-end more modular. TypeScript is a compile-to-JavaScript language that helps you build scalable and maintainable applications. Separately, they are both awesome technologies but when used together they form an awesome team that allows you to build robust, refactorable, maintainable codebases that can scale to large applications. In this session, we’ll take a look at a real-world application that takes full advantage of the scalability features React, Redux and TypeScript provide.

Using Storybook to Build a Better... Game Engine?

Storybook is a tool that makes it easier to build, test, and document UI components in isolation. That's already fantastic but let me tell you a secret: did you know that Storybook is framework-agnostic and can be used for other graphically-rich libraries like... a game engine?

I'll show you how I set up Storybook to showcase and test features in our open source game engine. This not only improved the development experience by isolating visual tests, it made our users lives better with richer documentation they could learn from. Best of all, I'll be sharing how to get the same fundamental benefits for your own apps and libraries!

For web developers of any skill range.