Recent Conference Talks

All of my talks, including slides and feedback ratings, can be found on Joind.in: https://joind.in/user/colinodell/talks

letsgo - The Ultimate Platform CLI

KubeCon NA 2025

letsgo - title slide

Platform interfaces should meet developers where they are. At SeatGeek, our "letsgo" CLI brings our entire platform to the terminal, complimenting our traditional platform interfaces with a powerful command-line experience. And not just for manual ad-hoc interactions, but also within CI/CD pipelines and other custom automations!

Beyond Review Apps - title slide

Traditional review apps often fall short when testing complex multi-service interactions. At SeatGeek, shared staging resources made this a massive pain and prevented true isolation. We solved this by building "Ephie" – an ephemeral environment capability using Argo CD that empowers engineers to create fully isolated, multi-service environments on demand.

Demystifying Unicode

Longhorn PHP 2021

ASCII is so 1963. Nowadays, computers must support a broad range of different characters beyond the 128 we had in the early days of computing - not just accents and emojis but also completely different writing systems used around the globe. The Unicode standard packs a whopping 143,859 characters into an elegant system used by over 95% of the Internet, but PHP's string functions don't play nicely with Unicode by default, making it difficult for developers to properly handle such a wide array of possible user inputs.

Releasing High-Quality PHP Packages

Longhorn PHP 2021

Releasing open-source libraries is more than sharing your GitHub URL with the world. There are many considerations and steps involved especially for successful and long-lived projects.

In this talk, we’ll cover the principles behind creating, releasing, and maintaining high-quality libraries. Topics will include structuring the repository, implementing modern PHP standards, maintaining changelogs, using CI tests, releasing new versions, and more.

Releasing High-Quality PHP Packages

ConFoo Montreal 2019

Releasing open-source libraries is more than sharing your Github URL with the world. There are many considerations and steps involved especially for successful and long-lived projects.

In this talk we’ll cover the principles behind creating, releasing and maintaining high-quality libraries. Topics will include structuring the repository, implementing modern PHP standards, maintaining changelogs, using CI tests, releasing new versions and more.

Debugging Effectively

ConFoo Montreal 2019

Software bugs are inevitable; some are especially difficult to track down causing you to waste countless hours before throwing your hands up in defeat. It doesn't have to be this way! Fatigue and wasted time can be avoided with strategies and techniques to break through those mental barriers. Attendees will learn how to combine these techniques with the right mindset and attitude in order to debug their code quickly and effectively

Automating Deployments with Deployer

php[world] 2018

Have you ever botched a deployment and taken a site offline? I have—more times then I’d like to admit. What if we could completely automate the deployment process, make it lightning fast, remove most of the risk, and do it all without custom bash scripts? Better yet, what if we could use the same deployment process locally or trigger it via CI?

Debugging Effectively

DrupalCon: Nashville 2018

Software bugs are inevitable; some are especially difficult to track down, causing you to waste countless hours before throwing your hands up in defeat. It doesn't have to be this way! The mental fatigue and wasted time can be avoided by using strategies like identifying the most-appropriate tool, taking a logical & objective approach, challenging assumptions, listening to variables, isolating the code path, and reinforcing code with automated tests.

Debugging Effectively

Web Developers Central NJ Meetup

Software bugs are inevitable; some are especially difficult to track down, causing you to waste countless hours before throwing your hands up in defeat. It doesn't have to be this way! The mental fatigue and wasted time can be avoided by using strategies like identifying the most-appropriate tool, taking a logical & objective approach, challenging assumptions, listening to variables, isolating the code path, and reinforcing code with automated tests.