I've created many different kinds of content and given many types of presentations, but everything I do comes down to one principle:

The Story is Key.

As Steve Jobs famously said, "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller." If I can't tell a compelling story showing how our product makes life better for our customers, they're not going to buy it. A list of product features won't get the job done; we have to have a story built around the customer's pain points.

A couple of examples:

• Bringing Enterprise Scale to Jenkins with CloudBees CI - the story in this video is how Jenkins gets started in an organization and the problems customers have trying to scale it across their business. You can have lots of small servers with no governance and control, or you can have a monolithic server that tries but fails to support everyone. (Spoiler alert: CloudBees CI answers both of these problems.)
• The videos Basic Chatbottery, Advanced Chatbotting, and Kubernetes Secrets tell an unconventional but equally effective story. The videos show how to create a chatbot that acts as the Royal Valet for Pharoah Rameses II of Ancient Egypt. (Stay with me.) The video shows how to define intents, entities, and dialogs to interpret the king's wishes without asking any unnecessary questions...which is exactly how anyone would use the product.

It's the perfect gift for any occasion.

I wrote XSLT, published by O'Reilly and Associates. Along with the text of the book, I created hundreds of sample stylesheets plus XSLT extension functions in Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and C#. The book has sold 50,000 copies and counting and is also available in German and Russian translations.

Whatever the occasion, the book always makes a thoughtful gift for your friends and loved ones, as this unsolicited testimonial illustrates:

"When I gave [the book] to my girlfriend for her birthday, she just sat there in stunned silence. I can honestly say she hasn't looked at me the same way since. Thanks, XSLT Second Edition!"

–Email from a grateful reader, February 2023

I am also a coauthor of Programming Web Services with SOAP. That book has been translated into German and Italian.

The range of customer-facing content I've created includes web pages, white papers, blogs, surveys...and lots of videos. Here are some examples:

• Gradle Enterprise Test Distribution explainer video - There are a number of ways to distribute test cases to make things faster. This animated video shows how the different approaches work, making it clear that Gradle Enterprise is the best solution. It wraps up with a product demo.
• Redis Digital Transformation Index Survey Report - This report shows the state of digital transformation in the industry. I created and administered the survey, analyzed the data, wrote the report, and worked with an agency to make it look beautiful.
• Creating Highly Available Systems with Redis Enterprise - Open-source Redis is great, but as your business grows, you'll need enterprise features like High Availability. That's where Redis Enterprise comes in.
• Tabs vs. Spaces: Settling the Question Once and For All - The frustration and consternation over indentation punctuation is brought to a cessation in this conversation.

There are dozens of videos on my YouTube channel as well.

I've also created lots of internal marketing content such as sales enablement materials, release notes, messaging guidelines, and go-to-market plans.

I am a JavaOne Rock Star and have given more than 500 presentations in more than 150 cities in 46 countries. In my years as a technology evangelist, I have done hands-on workshops, keynote addresses, conference breakout sessions, panel presentations, and guest lectures at universities.

Every presentation I've ever given to a developer audience has included live, running code. Some of that code was mature, tested, production-quality code; some of it was a build that finished 20 minutes before my session started. But all of it ran, perfectly, every single time.*

Here's how I want my audience to feel about the product or technology I'm evangelizing:

This thing is huge. It's going to help us seize opportunities and fight threats. And we've got to start using it before our competition does.

* Of course not. But you've got to work without a net if you want a developer's respect.

I have written dozens and dozens of articles, tutorials, blogs, cheat sheets, white papers, and other content. Together they've generated millions of page views and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Vietnamese.

Here are some sample titles:

• Fast, Secure Data Deduplication Solutions with Redis - Covers a number of deduplication use cases and how Redis sets and Bloom filters handle those situations easily.
• Blog: Anatomy of a Build Cache Node Crash - The Gradle Enterprise Engineering team had a node crash; I worked with the team to tell the story of what happened and how Gradle Enterprise made it easy to tell what was wrong.
• Manipulating Emojis in Java, or What is 🐻 + 1? - A Java char isn't large enough to store an emoji character; this article shows you how to work with them.
• Strangulating the Monolith: How to Streamline Pipelines by Decomposing Large Chunks of Code - One in a set of software development design patterns. The discussion includes when the pattern is applicable, what its motivations are, and has links to multiple case studies.
• The Browser Wars and the Birth of JavaScript - JavaScript, the little language that could, was created by Brendan Eich in ten days. This article tells the story.

Many of the articles, tutorials, and workshops I've done have featured code samples, either demonstrations or exercises. Here are a few things that I've done over the years:

• The Compile Driver - This ride from the Coderland amusement park is a great illustration of serverless computing in action. In addition to the video content available on the ride's home page, there are three GitHub repos:
  • The image overlay code - Given a photo, returns that photo with the Coderland logo and a timestamp on it.
  • The React front end to the photo booth - This uses your machine's webcam to take a picture and send it to the image overlay service.
  • The Knative proxy code - This handles communication with Knative, setting the required HTTP headers for you.
• The Reactica Roller Coaster - Another Coderland ride, this uses reactive programming to determine the wait time for the roller coaster. This includes video content and two GitHub repos:
  • The Reactica code - This code uses a number of pieces of Red Hat middleware to handle all of the events generated by the system.
  • A starter Vert.X application - This is a simple introduction to reactive programming.
• The developerWorks Horoscope Service - The source code for the application used in the Introduction to Istio video (aka the haircut video) I did several years ago.

I bring positivity, creativity, and humor to work every day.

With a Master's in Computer Science and a Bachelor's in English, I have a unique ability to start with difficult technical concepts and end with straightforward explanations that tell our audience how something works and why it deserves to exist. And put those explanations in a story with the right amount of creativity and humor.

If you'd like to know more about me, check out my resume, my video resume, or any of these links: