Michael Dalessio

2022-07-06 / Shopify and Open Source: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship: How to make Ruby a 100-year language.
2019-05-22 / Embracing Change as an Organization (Slides): How a 500-person organization can stay agile and embrace change.
2015-12-18 / Abstraction, or, The Gift of Our Weak Brains: "Our brains are naturally limited. This can be a curse, or it can be a gift, depending on how you look at it."
2014-05-06 / Immersion: "Nothing is hidden, everything is transparent, and you are in the driver’s seat."
2013-10-02 / enterprise-fu, or, How To Succeed in Business Like A Ninja Samurai: Subversive lessons from two decades spent in enterprisey companies.

2023-10 / Rails::HTML5: the strange and remarkable three-year journey (Video) (Slides): An accessible deep dive into the evolution of Rails to include HTML5-compliant sanitization, which provides better security for Rails applications. (Presented at Rails World 2023)
2022-09 / RubyShield, Ruby Central, and Shopify (Podcast interview): Evan Phoenix and I were interviewed by Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci on the Programming Throwdown podcast about our personal journies in Ruby, how we learn, and how we came to work together on RubyShield, a security partnership between Shopify and Ruby Central.
2021-11-09 / Put That Test Down, You Don't Know Where It's Been (Video): One afternoon in early 2021, a 14-year-old test in Rails started failing. Nobody understood why. This 12 minute video will amuse and/or annoy you with a mystery that spans decades and tech stacks. (Presented at RubyConf 2021)
2021-11-09 / Building Native Extensions Part Two (Video) (Slides) (Code): Part two, a bit broader look at C extensions in Ruby, including an explanation of why Nokogiri chose to start precompiling native packages. (Presented at RubyConf 2021)
2021-09-11 / Building Native Extensions Part One (Video) (Slides) (Code): A deep look at the techniques and toolchain used to ship native (precompiled) versions of Nokogiri and other rubygems with C extensions. (Presented at RubyKaigi 2021)
2018-02-21 / Cloud Foundry Overview (Podcast): In an interview published on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, I talk about Cloud Foundry, Pivotal, and a potpourri of other topics.
2017-05-24 / Ruby Values (Article): A meditation by an aged software engineer on the principles and values learned from the Ruby community, and how the GORUCO conference is changing along with the community.
2015-05-28 / why you're in the right place at the right time (Presentation): A talk given to CUNY students and recent grads about the importance of community in shaping a career.
2014-10-10 / Agile Inceptions 101 (Presentation): An internal "Core Practice" talk given at Pivotal Labs.
2013-09-20 / History of Nokogiri (Video) (Slides): The history of a ^✌successful^✌ OSS project, along with humorous stories and lessons learned. This talk, given multiple times, is presented here in its final version from GoGaRuCo 2013.

Selected Talks and Essays

Occasionally, I Say Things of General Interest

Some Things Are For a Narrower Audience

And Some Things are Pretty Esoteric