I celebrated the official launch of Appium 2 with a set of webinars hosted by HeadSpin. This talk was presented in order to give a bit of the backstory behind Appium 2's development as well as showcase the set of new features and changes to be aware of when adoping Appium 2.

Here's the AppiumConf 2021 keynote, which happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, making it impossible for us to hold the conference in person. My secret demo for this talk was to produce an Appium 2 plugin for automating Unity-based games! Appium 2 was not yet released and so the rest of the talk was as discussion about the development process for it.

I gave this keynote talk to kick off AppiumConf 2019 in Bengaluru, India. In it I demonstrate how to write an Appium driver for IoT devices! It was super fun to build an actual bit of hardware (a drum machine, in fact), and then have Appium automate it.

My AppiumConf 2018 keynote, wherein I play ukulele accompanied by an Appium orchestra!

I was a guest on this StackOverflow Podcast, where we discussed open source community health, the philosophy of technology, and music. I played a bit of live music for the show, and the full version of the song I played is also available online: When There Was Still Code to Write (Ukulele Version).

As someone who works as a professional in the field of software automation and automation tools, I wanted to apply some critical philosophy of technology to the specific topic of automation. This SauceCon 2017 keynote talk was a perfect opportunity for such reflection! It culminated in a completely automated performance of a song I wrote with Appium driving various instruments including a text-to-speech synthesizer. Kind of spooky, actually!

In this talk I took my experience of running a large open source project, and added some research on the philosophy of open source, and tried to put together a model for sustainability in corporate-sponsored open source development.

This is one of the funnest talks I've ever put together, simply because the whole involves dozens of puns based on 80s-era Sci-Fi movies and shows! More importantly, it's the first complete description of what became Appium's vision from Appium 2.0 and beyond.

This was my first opportunity to give a presentation at a tech conference that wasn't about a technical topic. Instead, I got to share some of my thoughts (and worries) about the place of technology in our broader lives. In this presentation I tried to elucidate the concept of the "Device Paradigm" and explain why it mattered to us as practitioners of technology. It was also fun to build a realtime demo where attendees could write how they're feeling and have it float across the screen, while I performed an original song written for the event!

Before there was async/await in JS, we had a brief moment of freedom from callbacks using generators! Here is my contribution to that syntactic conversation.

In this presentation, I showcased a pretty risky live demo, involving playing a song I'd written with a backup band consisting of mobile music apps automated by Appium.

This was Appium's formal debut on the world stage (not counting the demo of an early incarnation of the idea that became Appium, which was demoed at SeleniumConf 2012).

This is the major project / small thesis which consituted the capstone of my masters degree in Theology. It describes how recent efforts to bring Generative AI (GenAI) use into popular demand have spawned a number of urgent questions about the nature of AI and the consequences of embedding such systems more deeply into human life. By relying on insights from both philosophy and theology, I argue that, in addition to the various "external" or existential risks and unintended consequences of GenAI, its use poses a special risk to the "internal" character of human life. Because it treats human creative artifacts as raw grist for the content mill, and surrenders the creative process itself to a technological device, thoughtless GenAI use risks the atrophy of the creative faculties whose expression is an important part of a flourishing human experience and vocation.

With the recent and sharp rise in the adoption of AI assistants, particular in fields formerly related to creative work, I felt the need to put forward my thoughts on the consequences of AI usage for human creativity. I argue that while AI assistants embody a huge amount of promise in terms of making creative production easier, there are tradeoffs and dangers involved in their use, particularly for our human faculties that we prize most highly.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a lot of discussion around the place of church in public life during quarantine. Online-only services started to pop up, prompting the question for many of when church would make the jump to a completely virtual reality. I wrote this article to explore some of the philosophical and theological foundations of VR and what "VR church" might even mean as a concept. Spoiler alert: I'm not bullish on VR church!

Together with Matt Germonprez and Sean Goggins, I published this paper in First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the topic of the Internet. The abstract is as follows:

My first foray into the philosophy of technology was via the work of Albert Borgmann, and specifically his book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. His ideas were so powerful and fruitful for me that I wanted to get to know them more intimately as well as to make them more easily accessible to non-philosophers. And so I set out to blog through each chapter of his book, summarizing and explicating the important points. Ultimately, this work even opened up the possibility to meet the man himself, and to have the wonderful opportunity to interview Albert at his home in Montana.

In 2015 I attended the annual conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, in an attempt to learn more about the field of philosophy of technology. I gave this paper at the conference, discussing Albert Borgmann's "Device Paradigm" in conjunction with open source software.