From Blind Trust to Real Trust: Practical Steps for IT Teams

Trust is a vital factor in the success of any organization, affecting speed, cost, culture, and teamwork. Blindly trusting teams can lead to gullibility and waste. Even more challenging are the many counterfeits, behaviors we do in hopes to build trust, but bite the teams and the business in the long run. In this session we will review how many IT teams have begun to create a sense of forced or false trust, and work through simple proven strategies to flip it into real trust. Whether you are a leader or team member, you will walk away with actionable insights for building real trust in IT teams, improving culture, collaboration, and business performance. Let’s turn the phrase "Trust me, I'm an engineer" into a reality, not a punchline.

Docker Unleashed: Enhancing Local Environments with Ease

A high-quality local environment is critical for enabling developers for efficient feature delivery. Docker, when utilized correctly, can simplify the maintenance of the local environment and remove the "it works on my machine” symptom. Join me on an insightful journey as I share years of successes and hard-earned lessons from harnessing Docker for consistent, hassle-free environments. We will review what Docker is and when to use it, how it changes the development accountabilities between teams, the architecture behind an efficient local environment to enable smooth pipelines and production deployment and will unveil valuable tips and real-world examples to optimize Docker usage and boost your development productivity.

This session will review when to and when not to utilize docker, process changes from both developer and operations perspective and the value to each, and provide basic examples to help people get started quickly. Examples use Docker and NodeJS.

I have delivered this at OLFConference and Stir Trek, and was well received. I have also received feedback at later dates on how useful this intro is and how teams have successfully implemented my strategies from this talk.

What is Your Working Genius?

The working genius model is a productivity model developed by Patrick Lencioni with the goal of accomplishing a simple concept: bringing more joy and fulfillment at work! When you and your team understand where your geniuses are and how to (and when not to) use them, it can improve meetings, reduce burnout, and dramatically reduce turbulence in getting projects done. In this session we will review the 6 types of working geniuses and how they bring projects from ideation to implementation. We will discover the hidden cause of burnout and how to keep meetings, including our agile ceremonies, more focused and more productive as a whole, all with the goal of improving your life and team culture, both in and outside of work. (that's right… ALL projects!)

What is Your Working Genius? (Workshop)

The working genius model is a productivity model developed by Patrick Lencioni with the goal of accomplishing a simple concept: bringing more joy and fulfillment at work! When you and your team understand where your geniuses are and how to (and when not to) use them, it can improve meetings, reduce burnout, and dramatically reduce turbulence in getting projects done. In this workshop we will review the 6 types of working geniuses and how they bring projects from ideation to implementation. We will discover the hidden cause of burnout and how to keep meetings, including our agile ceremonies, more focused and more productive as a whole, all with the goal of improving your life and team culture, both in and outside of work. (that's right… ALL projects!)

This workshop will allow everyone to take the assessment at no cost. We will create teams and go over mock scenarios and go into depth on how this affects teamwork and dramatically reduce turbulent culture.

Wrapping Trust in a < DIV >

Pro tip: Saying “Trust me, I’m an engineer” doesn’t actually build trust, it only fools the gullible. Real trust has the full potential of speeding up everything involved with tech, from coding to project management. It can break down communication barriers and shatter client expectations. There is of course a catch: trust is extremely complex, dissected by many people with many different models and strategies to build. To simplify things, I created a much more simplified model, and very memorable for engineers, just wrap it in a < div >. Join me as we focus on three high level concepts which I utilize every single day to build trust within myself, my team and the business: Delivery, Integrity, and Vulnerability. You will walk away with actionable steps to start building real, meaningful, trust.

Internally to work, we have a trust initiative, breaking things into 17 pieces, and there are still more out there. As good as it is to understand it at that detailed of a level, it takes a long time to learn each of those factors, and harder still to actually use them all. The focus on this presentation is to create a more memorable system targeted at the IT world and our regular agile practices.

Unpacking Process Anti-Patterns: Lessons from Ideation to Delivery

In the fast-paced world of software engineering, processes often shape success—or sow frustration. Over the years, recurring anti-patterns have emerged—well-meaning practices that unintentionally create inefficiencies, stifle innovation, or harm team dynamics. These pitfalls, though rooted in good intentions, can derail projects and undermine trust when left unchecked.

Through real-world examples and two decades of industry experience, this presentation unpacks common process anti-patterns across the software lifecycle. With a focus on fostering understanding, not blame, we’ll examine how flawed workflows contribute to challenges—and how reversing them can empower teams to build clarity, creativity, collaboration, and trust.

Going Open Source: Container Driven Development with Podman

A high-quality local development environment is critical for enabling developers to deliver features efficiently. Containers, when implemented effectively, simplify the maintenance of local environments and eliminate the dreaded "it works on my machine" problem. Join me for an insightful session as I share years of experience and hard-earned lessons from leveraging tools like Podman to create consistent, hassle-free development environments. We’ll explore what containers are and when to use them, how they reshape development accountabilities between teams, the architecture behind efficient local environments that support smooth pipelines and production deployment, and unveil valuable tips and real-world examples to optimize container-based workflows for maximum productivity.