Tim Rayburn
Vice President of Consulting at Improving
Plano, Texas, United States
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Tim Rayburn is a Vice President of Consulting with Improving Enterprises, a software and project management consulting company in Dallas, TX. He is a passionate advocate of apprenticeship and mentorship in corporate environments. He has been awarded the Microsoft MVP in recognition of his expertise and community leadership 11 times. He is also a conference organizer, an author, and can be found speaking across the nation on agile processes, software design, and career management. He lives in the North Dallas area with his amazing wife Kate and their loyal dogs Dresden and Radagast.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Tools in your AI's Toolbox : An introduction to MCP Servers
The generative AI revolution has unlocked unprecedented capabilities, but the next frontier is agency: empowering models to interact with, query, and act upon the world. The current challenge is the “N x M integration problem,” where every AI model requires a custom, brittle integration for each external tool or data source. This approach simply doesn’t scale. How can we give an AI access to our sales leads, code repositories, or IoT devices in a standardized, secure, and reusable way?
This session introduces Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open-source framework designed to solve this challenge and become the universal connector—the USB-C port—for AI. MCP standardizes how AI models discover and use external tools, moving beyond simple function-calling to a robust, client-server architecture. We will dive into how this open protocol is creating a new ecosystem for building powerful, context-aware AI agents.
Join this session for a developer-focused introduction where you will learn how to:
Understand the core concepts of the open-source Model Context Protocol and its architecture.
Utilize pre-built, open-source MCP servers to instantly connect AI to tools like Git, Slack, and databases.
Build a custom MCP server to securely expose your own proprietary data and APIs as tools for any compliant AI.
Move beyond bespoke integrations and contribute to a standardized, collaborative, and open ecosystem.
Stop building one-off connectors and start building intelligent agents. This session will give you the practical knowledge to leverage MCP and create the next generation of AI that doesn’t just talk, but does.
Help Your Teams Avoid Burnout And Apathy
We work in a fast paced, constantly growing, high demand industry that is known for creating burnout and apathy for teams who constantly live under this emotional pressure. Tropes like “people quit managers not jobs” aren’t enough to guide us to real solutions. Over the last 13 years I’ve helped growing a company from 40 employees to 1,500 employees and regular winner of Best Places to Work awards. To avoid the pitfalls we must balance two critical areas, engaging minds and engaging hearts. Come learn how to use Autonomy, Mastery, and Achievement to engage minds, and balance that with Purpose and Appreciation to engage hearts.
Measure Twice, Code Once – A Guide To Performance Measurement in .NET
Highly performant code is important, all the more so in our modern cloud-centric pay-per-cpu costing model. But given the ever-evolving nature of our industry, if the new coolness also efficient or just cool? I’ve been developing software as a consultant for over 20 years, focused on large distributed systems, and that has led me to some very clear opinions about where and how to measure performance, what trade-offs are worth it, and which are not. In this session you’ll learn what tools I use to evaluate performance, the areas of an application to focus on for performance, and how each of these interact with cloud-based hosting strategies of today.
The Terminal is the New IDE: Rise of the Agentic CLI
For years, AI developer assistance has been synonymous with the IDE, living as autocomplete and chat sidebars. This paradigm is rapidly shifting. A new class of "Agentic CLI" tools, including Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI, is moving AI development out of the editor and into the terminal. This talk explores the "why" behind this migration, demonstrating how the terminal's power, composability, and capacity for parallel, asynchronous workflows make it the ideal environment for true agentic delegation—transforming the developer's role from pair-programmer to technical director. We will dive deep into the value proposition of these tools, explaining how they function less like assistants and more like autonomous teammates capable of planning, executing, and testing complex features. Central to this new power is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard enabling these agents to securely interact with file systems, APIs, and project context. Finally, we will compare the agentic capabilities and default "tools" (like file system access, shell execution, and Git integration) offered by the leading CLI agents, providing a clear map of the emerging agentic development landscape.
Atlanta Developers' Conference 2025 Sessionize Event
Tulsa Developers Association
Measure Twice, Code Once – A Guide To Performance Measurement in .NET
North Houston .NET User Group
Measure Twice, Code Once – A Guide To Performance Measurement in .NET
2023 Data.SQL.Saturday.LA Sessionize Event
Denver Dev Day | Spring 2023 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Austin 2023 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Denver
Help Your Teams Avoid Burnout And Apathy
North Dallas Developer's Group
Using MassTransit and Kafka
PrairieDevCon Calgary
Help Your Teams Avoid Burnout And Apathy
Little Rock Tech Fest 2022 Sessionize Event
Houston DevOpsDays
Help Your Teams Avoid Burnout And Apathy
Data Saturday Atlanta Sessionize Event
Atlanta Developers' Conference 2022 Sessionize Event
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