Speaking

I enjoy speaking about software development topics. I have presented at a number of conferences, both public and within the companies I have worked for.

I was pleased to be a guest on the Mob Mentality show in March 2024:

Topics

Some of the topics I've covered in presentations include:

Here are the abstracts from some of the presentations I've given:

Mob Programming

Mob programming is described by Woody Zuill as "all the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer." In this talk, I discuss my experiences with teams that practice mob programming daily, including fully remote teams. I cover what mob programming is, the principles that make it effective, and many of the benefits it provides.

A version of this talk was recorded at a virtual meeting of the SLC.NET User Group:

Your Architecture is Coupled to Your Culture

Can the culture of your company negatively impact your software architecture? Should your desired software architecture lead to changing how teams are structured in your organization? In this talk I will discuss how this hidden coupling affects software projects and give some specific examples of how Pluralsight leveraged it.

Software Craftsmanship

There is a growing movement within the software industry that calls for people who write code to act and be treated more professionally. Software craftsmanship is a way to do so. This presentation covers aspects of craftsmanship and why both developers and employers should want it practiced.

Upgrading Technical Interviews

How can you display your strengths during an interview? What should you say when you are stumped? How can you tell if the company or role is a good fit for you?

If you are an interviewer, how can you effectively probe a candidate's technical ability? What kind of coding challenges should you use? Are you forgetting the point amid all of the process?

In this session, Allan will share a variety of simple things you can do to improve your next interview. We will cover some common pitfalls candidates should avoid, and suggestions for influencing the direction of an interview. He'll also share how he has come to structure interviews and why. These lessons are drawn from his experiences over more than a decade of software engineering interviews.

Recovering From Distractions

Conventional wisdom holds that you should eliminate distractions from your workplace, especially if you are writing code. But what if instead we got better at recovering from distractions, much like we can focus on mean-time-to-recovery over mean-time-between-failures? This presentation covers some important and powerful techniques that will aid you in getting back to work after that notification you got about those new cat videos.

Speaker Bio

Allan Stewart is a lead software engineer at SynkedUP. He enjoyed computers and writing code from a young age, which led him to earn his Computer Science degree and go on to a professional software development career. He has experience from small local shops up to international enterprise companies doing full-stack development with a focus on server-side APIs.

Since graduation from college in 2006, Allan has learned that how we write software is as important as getting a job done. He is an advocate for test-driven clean code written by collaborative teams using Agile, Lean, and DDD practices. He has spoken at a number of conferences and user groups, including Agile Roots, Big Mountain Data & Dev, and 0111 Conf.