Guy Royse
Developer Advocate at Redis
Columbus, Ohio, United States
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Guy works for Redis as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for learning—and for sharing what he has learned—Guy explores interesting topics and spreads the knowledge he has gained around developer communities worldwide.
Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He runs his local JavaScript meetup in Ohio and has served on the selection committees of numerous conferences. He'll happily speak anywhere that will have him and has even has helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.
In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. In his spare time he likes to camp and studies history and linguistics.
Guy lives in Ohio with his wife, his sons, and an entire wall of board and role-playing games.
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Area of Expertise
Codex: The Impact of English on Programming Languages
There are two types of biases in the world. Those that you are aware of and those that you are not. A good goal is to try to move the later biases into the former category, to make you aware of your hidden biases. This allows you to do something about them. Otherwise, these biases can creep into many aspects of our life and our world.
Language, in particular, is a very power bias that most of us are unaware of. It shapes how we think, how we talk, and how we describe the world. It informs much of what we do and what we make, including our technology. Including our programming languages.
So, I'm going to explore the impact of human language on our code. I'll look at how vocabulary and grammar in English is reflected in the languages we use. And, I'll play some "what if" games to help us see past our bias by speculating on what programming languages would look like if they had been written by speakers of different languages.
In doing this, we can discover new ways to look at programming and programming languages. When we're done, you'll look at the relationship between language and programming in a way you've probably never done before. And you'll be aware of a hidden bias that you've had your entire career.
Tracking Aircraft with Streams + Software-Defined Radio
Aircraft are everywhere. Knowing exactly where is paramount as it’s considered bad form for two aircraft to be in the same place at the same time. To avoid this, aircraft worldwide constantly and publicly broadcast their location, heading, and all sorts of other data using a system called ADS-B or Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast.
This data is a natural fit for an event stream. After all, it’s a constant stream of data that is literally being broadcast in real-time. But how can we capture these broadcasts and the data within? Surely it must require expensive hardware and special tools!
Not so much. It turns out that we can capture ADS-B data easily using a combination of a cheap radio dongle and free software—a combination called software-defined radio. From there we can store it in an event stream and consume, transform, and publish it at our leisure. Cool, right?
In this session, you’ll learn how software-defined radio works (and not just for ADB-S), how to receive and store ADS-B data in event streams, and how to use those streams to build a map showing real-time flight data using Node.js, Redis Streams, and whatever front-end JavaScript framework happens to be popular that day!
Putting the D&D in TDD
Are you tired of TDD workshops that make you do boring things like calculating bowling scores and prime factors or demonstrate how to win the game of life? If so, this is the session for you! In this TDD workshop, we will be building the domain model for EverCraft -- a new MMORPG from Blizzards of the Coast. We have lots of story cards prepared to cover features from combat to magic, classes to spells, and races to items. Plus, we'll be defining some of these cards during the session in case you want that +9 knife of ogre slaying or enjoy casting magic missile at the darkness.
This workshop is language agnostic and for all levels of developers. The focus is on TDD and emergent design but pair programming will be covered as well. The only requirement is that you bring a laptop and that you be able to test-drive your code with your language of choice. When you are done you will emerge a better programmer for the experience but there is a small chance you will have a craving for Cheetos and Mountain Dew.
You've Probably Never Heard of the Reticulum Network
The networks we use every day depend on centralized infrastructure that's vulnerable to censorship, surveillance, and single points of failure. Whether it's disasters, deliberate interference, or plain old downtime, entire populations can, in an instant, be cut off from digital communication—sometimes when they need it most. The heart of the problem is hierarchy—the hierarchical structure of these networks makes them easy to exploit or to simply shut down.
Reticulum is one solution to this problem. It's a cryptography-based networking stack that flattens the hierarchy entirely. It was built for creating resilient, ad hoc, and private networks using almost any communication hardware you can imagine—from LoRa, WiFi, and Ethernet to old school packet radio and serial ports. Whether you're dealing with natural disasters or just want communications that can't be easily disrupted, Reticulum is a powerful tool for building independent, interconnectable networks that work without central points of control.
This talk will break down what Reticulum is and dig into how the protocol works—from its clever addressing tricks to its baked-in encryption. We'll explore the built-in utilities that ship with Reticulum; try out apps like MeshChat, NomadNet, and Sideband for communication; and even show some code and learn how to build apps of our own.
By the end, you'll understand how Reticulum and the applications that run on it work and how to set it all up for yourself. Plus, you'll have the knowledge to grow the network and its capabilities by writing with applications of your own. But most importantly, you'll walk away understanding how to build communication networks that can survive disasters, resist interference, and keep working when traditional infrastructure fails.
Agents & Arbiters - An Adventurer’s Guide to Multi-Agent Collaboration with LangGraph.js
Building interactive systems with conventional coding means trying to anticipate every possible user action and writing the right response. This quickly becomes nigh impossible. You end up lost in a maze of recursion, fragility, and nested if statements. The more interactive you make your system, the more complex your code gets, until debugging feels like being eaten by a grue—you know something's wrong, but you're just fumbling around in the dark.
There's a better way. Instead of scripting every interaction, we can give some of the elements in our system their own intelligence. Multi-agent collaboration lets us create systems where entities can become autonomous agents with their own perspectives and voices. Imagine a text-based adventure game where the brass lantern, the white house, and even the mailbox have something to say when responding to the player. Or consider a help desk system where agents from billing, technical support, and account management each weigh in to determine the best solution for a customer.
In this session, we'll explore multi-agent collaboration through a live demo of a text-based adventure system. You'll meet the orchestration workflow—router, classifier, agents, arbiter, and committer—and discover how LangGraph.js coordinates the chaos when multiple agents want to respond. We'll shine our brass lantern over the code to see how it uses Redis and LangGraph.js to make it all work. Then, we'll explore how this same approach solves real-world problems beyond gaming.
When the adventure's over, you'll understand how to coordinate agents to handle complex interactions and know when this is a good approach. You'll have a working example you can adapt for your own adventures—be they exploring the Great Underground Empire, customer service platforms, or content management systems. And, you'll never look at building interactive systems the same way again.
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