Public Talks

Observations about the human at work, building software.

Date Event Location Title
Nov 2026 Heapcon 🇷🇸 Belgrade, Serbia Software Estimates and the Illusion of Control
Jun 2026 Voxxed Days Luxembourg 2026 🇱🇺 Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg Did My Deploy Degrade Production?
May 2026 PyCon Italia 2026 🇮🇹 Bologna, Italy Stop asking me how long it will take
Apr 2026 VoxxedDays Amsterdam 2026 🇳🇱 Amsterdam, Netherlands Why smart developers write silly code
Mar 2026 Codemotion Roma 2026 🇮🇹 Rome, Italy It'll Take Two Weeks: Why Software Estimates Are a Pipe Dream
Nov 2025 J-Fall 2025 🇳🇱 Ede, Netherlands Your Brain Is Sabotaging Your Code, But We Can Outsmart It
Oct 2025 Swiss Python Summit 2025 🇨🇭 Rapperswil, Switzerland Software estimation: False sense of certainty
Jun 2025 Voxxed Days Luxembourg 2025 🇱🇺 Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg Software estimation is a delusion
Apr 2025 PyCon Austria 2025 🇦🇹 Eisenstadt, Austria Software Estimation is a Delusion (or Maybe Just a Misused Tool)
Mar 2025 Meetup of Meetups 🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia Why do developers like to argue so much?
Sep 2019 Python Meetup Ljubljana 🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia Applying Marketing Techniques to Developers' day-to-day
Oct 2017 Python Meetup Ljubljana 🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia Fluent Python: How to write Python as if it were your first programming language
Apr 2017 WebCamp Ljubljana 2017 🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia Conquering JSONB in PostgreSQL
Oct 2016 StripeCon 2016 🇸🇮 Ljubljana, Slovenia 10-ish Things I Learned from Programming an E-Shop for a Year

Talk Catalogue

Interested in having me speak at your event? Here's what I talk about.

Software Estimation is a Delusion

Software estimation has turned into ritualized guessing. We are pushed to estimate, but nobody is teaching us how to do it. Our estimates are deemed crucial, but the project’s specs keep changing mid-work. It’s time we abandoned long-term estimates and focus instead on managing project risks.

Nobody Cares What You Built

There’s an entire field dedicated to getting people to read what you write, developers just aren’t in it. We’re trained in precision and completeness. Marketers know people only skim, they decide in 3 seconds, and only care about what’s relevant to them. This talk steals their tricks for standups, PRs, proposals, and that email nobody answered.

Did My Deploy Break Production?

When you deploy some code, do you know its impact on your production stats, like memory usage, request duration, error rates? If you wanted to know if your code improved or deteriorated the speed of SQL queries, would you know where to get this data? In this talk, I’ll walk through a real-world system we built to automatically detect pattern changes to metrics without having to set thresholds manually. (And with no LLMs.)

Why smart developers write silly code

Knowing about cognitive biases is like debugging our brain. Devs spend tons of time fixing bugs in code, but biases are the mental bugs that mess with our decisions. They make us overconfident, they make us ignore users and fight for bad ideas. But it needn’t be this way.

API Resilience Patterns

Every API is doing its own thing. Authorization, headers, rate limiting (devs are creative people, so we just like to invent our own rules). After integrating 40+ APIs into the same product, I have a lot to say about handling failures of remote APIs.