Covid changed a lot. Lots of communities didn’t make, others started new and fresh. Here are some of the most active communities that I’m a part of… and least on a semi-regular basis. Someone recently asked me about other tech communities in the Dallas area that I would recommend… so here you go!

Dallas Software Developers (DSD) / Commit Your Code (CYC)

I put these together since they are largely the same organizers and same community. The difference is that DSD meets about twice a month and CYC is one of the best annual tech conferences around. They both represent a community of people that help each other out, are committed to see people succeed and grow in their careers. I cannot recommend getting involved with these communities enough.

DSD – Join the Discord! Join the Meetup Group. Follow them on LinkedIn. So much of this community takes place outside of the meetups. There are daily calls, cohorts, and a level of connectivity that is contagious (in the best way).

Dallas UX / Big Design Conference (UX / Design)

Like DSD/CYC, Dallas UX and The Big Design Conference have the same organizers.

Dallas UX is a monthly Meetup – the 3rd Monday each month at the Dallas Improving offices (a lot of local communities are host by my friends at Improving). Though, it looks like they don’t always meet at Improving, this month’s meetup is in a different location – so be sure to check the specific meeting!

Big Design is an annual conference – typically in April or May. The last couple of years it has been a single-track conference in Grapevine Texas. I really enjoy the format and how it brings people together for a common experience. There is something to be said about bigger is not always better. It looks like the official website is being rebuilt, check out this recap from last year’s event.

Def Con 940 / B-Sides (Cyber Security)

DefCon 940 is a monthly community, while B-Sides DFW is an annual event and is the local instance of a global community (they are everywhere). The DefCon and B-Sides communities are very much similar and a lot of the same people – all focused on Cyber Security and related topics.

DefCon 940 – 3rd Monday of every month (Same as Dallas UX). The best part of DefCon are the people. Very open and willing to help people grow. It’s also such an “on brand” venue – they literally meet underground, in the basement of Graffiti Pasta in Denta TX – try the Rasta Pasta – it’s delicious.

Graffiti Pasta

B-Sides DFW – I’ve been to the last 2 years in Dallas. Both were held at the UT Dallas Campus in Richardson. It’s a free 1-day event, and includes speakers, workshops (like lock picking and IoT soldering) and several capture the flag style events. It’s a great time and fantastic people. This year’s B-Sides will be on November 7, 2026

GDG Dallas

GDG Cloud Southlake is the largest Google Developer Groups in the region. Here’s the best part – they meet twice a month, once in person and once online. The monthly in-person events are purely to connect and meet with others. They meet at the local Flying Saucer for food and drinks and connections. The next in-person event will be October 1 – see you there!

The online meetings are where they focused on learning together and having what most people would think of as traditional user group topics.

The main organizer Jim, is someone I’ve known since 2013 – aver 20 years! Jim does a great job promoting not just GDG events, but he stays connected with so many of the other tech events that are happening around Dallas.

Dallas AI Collective

This global community has been key for several local AI focused events – helping to increase knowledge and approaches to leveraging AI. There is a Dallas Chapter and a North Dallas Chapter. Be sure to follow them on LinkedIn as well! Also, if you’re in the area – sign up for their AI Let’s /Hack Together! event this Saturday in Frisco. Hope to see you there!

Note: There is also Dallas AI that also puts on several events. Follow them on LinkedIn as well. You really could learn every day on the month in Dallas! Both of these groups have been critical for people building out their AI strategies.

North Dallas Developers

This group used to be the North Dallas .NET Developers, but they have since branched out to all things developer related. A great group of people, they meet on the 1st Wednesday of every month at the Improving offices in Plano. The biggest difference between the North Dallas Developers and the Dallas Software Developers in the pace of meetings and the focus. I would describe DSD as being more focused on new developers are people really working to break into the industry, why the North Dallas Developers group is more focused on every level of topic and developer interest. The other difference is that while DSD is active all month long with online communities and engagement, Noth Dallas Develoeprs is really an event you can attend once a month.

Wrap Up

That’s 7 communities and 3 conferences to spice up your life!

• Dallas Software Developers (Thurs … 1 – 2 times month) / Commit Your Code Conference
• Dallas UX3rd Monday / Big Design Conference April/May
• DefCon 940 3rd Monday / B-Sides DFW November (Cyber Security)
• GDG – Tech meetup at the Flying Saucer – 1st Thursday
• AI Collective (Dallas / North Dallas) / Dallas AI Org (various events)
• North Dallas Developers 1st Wed

What communities have I missed? What are your go to events you look forward to every month? Let me know over on Linked In!

Join the conversation on LinkedIn!

The promise and opportunity of AI cannot be overstated. Businesses are able to leverage automation and insights at never seen before levels… better yet – these opportunities are quickly becoming commoditized and available to businesses of all sizes. It’s important however, to not anchor around one approach or strategy. I’ve found many organizations that start down the AI journey and end up thinking about it only in the area where they start. Or worse, they place where they start – ends up owning all of the AI strategy and then anchoring all solutions around a single idea. These companies should be thinking of at least 4 paths independently of each other.

Each path deserving of its own roadmap, considerations and effort. Each has it’s own tradeoffs and benefits and must be considered independently, but of course, experience in one area does help inform the others.

4 primary paths for AI in your business:

1. AI is the Product
2. AI in the Product
3. AI to build the Product
4. AI to run the Product

AI is the Product.

This is where most companies start. It’s the fastest and easiest to implement – unless you want to build this yourself. Plenty of turn-key solutions and platforms exist for building intelligent chatbots and voice agents. Take a look at 11 Labs, Deepgram, Retell AI, and Twilio. Several telephony and CRM companies are now integrating AI/workflow products directly in their offerings.

Examples of this are chat bots, voice AI and other scenarios where the customers interact directly with the LLM models via a custom harness. Please see Ring Central and Five9 as examples.

AI in the Product

This is where things get powerful. You are building your application for your needs. Think of the scenarios that traditionally needed a human in the loop – often these can be supplemented with AI in the loop. This requires a much higher level of monitoring and performance checking. These integrations are often not obvious – but they can be extremely powerful!

Examples I’ve seen: filtering a contact import to exclude “non people”, deciding on next step needed step in a complex workflow, generating most likely response for a given scenario, accelerated on boarding in a tedious process, even features like “fill in the missing background” in products like Photo Shop and many others are non-obvious but powerful integrations.

Not all automation needs to be “smart” automation, but the opportunities here are continuing to grow. This is where platforms like Azure AI Foundry and Amazon Bedrock, and Ollama Cloud really shine – allowing you to centralize the hosting and management of multiple models and quickly swap out one model for another based on your needs and scenarios. Considering when and if to self-host open models leveraging the LLaMa platform should also be on your radar.

AI to build the Product (and other productivity tools)

This is where most developers – and even most conference talks tend to focus. With tools like Claude Code, SpaceX Codex, Cursor, GitHub CoPilot and Code Rabbit. These tools to accelerated building, multi-agent driven agentic processes continue to grow and grow.. the company token spend shows the increasing level of investment (and need to manage this from a FinOps perspective)

This is also where I put productivity AI tools (think AI for information workers) like Microsoft CoPilot, Anthropic Claude Cowork and Perplexity. These tools help with evaluating documents, generating creative assets and document review and feedback.

Candidly these are the tools where most companies see the biggest productivity gains – and where they probably have some of the largest blind spots. LLMs are great at sounding correct.

AI to run the Product

This is an area where many companies are missing out. Too many are used to traditional SRE roles and responses. LLMs – when given access to the logs, alerts and source control are often able to identify, find and correct real time issues rather quickly.

We’re starting to see glimpses of this future with tools like GitHub CoPilot participating directly and creating pull requests, that other agents can even review and approve. Tools like Harness are now directly integrating AI tooling into their pipelines and automations. On the observability front, we seeing tools like Data Dog take this front and center with their Bits AI agents. It truly is an exciting world that we’re stepping in to!

What’s Next

As with traditional software, the key to going fast, is going well. Maintaining the proper safe-guards and bumpers in place. Helping an entire product team to move together and not getting bogged down with “how we used to do things”. Things will change – and some things will continue to remain. This new world has never been an either-or, it’s always been a yes-and. What does that mean? It means the core tenets of what allows companies to run at speed – automation, safety, quality, innovation – vastly remains the same, but how we implement those principles is now supercharged with new skills, tools and opportunities to lean on.

I plan on digging a little deeper into each of these areas in the coming weeks – I hope you’ll join me for the journey! I’d love to hear more about your experiences in these 4 areas – what’s working, what has completely flopped – what areas of AI are you exploring outside of these 4 paths? Let me know over on LinkedIn – I look forward to connecting with you!

Join the conversation on LinkedIn.

This is the 3rd year of the Commit Your Code Conference and my 2nd time to speak. Also – it will be my 2nd time speaking at a Capital One hosted event – I’m really looking forward to it! Last year was a blast, and this year is going to be even more so!

Be sure to check out the full agenda – especially the included evening events (starting on day 0). This really is a $700+ conference that the organizers are putting together for $40 bucks. Also, don’t let the cost ever stop you from plugging in and growing – plenty of scholarships are available – connect with the Dallas Software Developers group to find out more.

This year will be a very different talk – rather than focusing on a technical topic, I’ll be covering major “aha!” moments that have happened this year as I’ve stepped in to my current CTO role. I’m really looking forward to this talk – especially since I’ll be closing out the Leadership track. Hope to see you there!

Update! The full agenda is now available. I will be speaking Thursday (Day 1) @ 1pm in the Pink Room. See you there! 

There are 125 sessions across 2 days with 4 tracks. It’s going to be an amazing event with extras happening before, during and after the event. I’m ready to learn, grow, meet new people – and completely exhaust myself. It’s going to be a blast. Each session will be exactly 25 minutes long. It will be two full days of whirl wind rapid fire learning. I’ll be giving a modified version of my “10 Reasons Your Software Sucks” talk (older version of my slides). Modified in the sense that it’s normally a 1 hour+ talk – so I’ll be trimming some stuff but really focusing on the high-value, most important parts – I’ll be giving 25 years of experience in 25 minutes – huzzah!

If you’re in the area, or can travel for this – there is a special rate block of rooms at the official hotel – most of the speakers will be staying there (myself included) – because the conference doesn’t stop at the end of the day!

Day 0 [Wed] Pickleball

Day 0 [Wed Night]
Pre-Conference at the Truck Yard!

Day 1 [Thurs Night]
Fowling

At $49 a ticket – this conference is by far the best conference for your money – and with 4 tracks, 125 sessions and some of the most incredible speakers traveling in for this – it’s going to be incredible. I even heard there will be minuture golf inside the venue and morning connections with coffee each day. All proceeds from tickets will be going directly to charities. If you can’t make it in person – remote / streaming tickets are 100% free. This is all around – one of the best things you could do with your time. I can’t wait!

Go check out the full list of speakers and the rest of the details at CommitYourCode.com

Hope to see you there!

I’ll be presenting tonight. If you’ve never been out to the Dallas Software Developer‘s Meetup – what a great time to start! This is absolutely one of the best developer communities thriving right now in the DFW metroplex. This is the group that hosted the Commit Your Code Conference last year, and again in September (You should get your tickets for CYC 2025 now – I’ll be speaking along with over 90 other presenters!)

I’ll be giving a condenced version of the Stop! Collaborate & Listen talk that I gave at THAT Conference last year. This is where I delve in to lessons learned from leading the UX Product Design team at GetThere – mostly focusing on paper prototyping and ways to get the most out of your rapid prototypes. It’s a lot of fun – hope to see you there!

As I mentioned on LinkedIn, my role at Schwab was eliminated in March in an org-restructure. It happens. In the time since, I’ve had several promising conversations with friends, past colleagues and various companies. I honestly am not sure what God has for me next, so I’m actively and aggressively doing my due-diligence to see what might be next.

I’m posting this because I would really like to join your team. Take a look at my LinkedIn recommendations, you’ll see that people really enjoy working with me. I am a great person to add to your team and bring the skills to level up your engineering practices.

Here is a quick snapshot:

• Industry veteran – I have a proven history working across a wide spectrum of verticals, technologies, roles, and companies. My deepest technical expertise is in the Microsoft stack and .NET, but I also have a proven record leading agile transformations, user experience product-design teams, CI/CD initiatives. I’ve worked in every technology stack and every cloud – all of them. I am a Swiss-army knife of technical leadership.
  
• Hands-on. I’m a doer. Delivery is one of my core values. I lead without micro-managing. I excell and software coaching and solving hard challenges. I also believe strongly in leading by doing. Teaching by showing.
  
  
• Software & Process Craftsmanship – I believe that the way to go fast, is to go well. That engineering discipline is what allows teams to deliver quickly with quality. I also practice pragmatism and not trying to fix what isn’t broken. The goal of a business … is the goal. The goal is not necessarily to have the most perfect software and process ever. Shipping is a core value. Shipping quickly with quality is what why I practice craftsmanship.
  
  
• Comfortable working and leading remotely. I actually like being in an office. That being said I spent 3 years successfully working and leading a team in Detroit (Rocket Mortgage / Quicken Loans) from here in Texas. I’ve also lead global teams that spanned North America, Ireland and India.
  
  
• Guest lecturer, DBU. I’m a regular guest lecture at Dallas Baptist University’s dual master’s MSIS program. In the past I helped develop the web programming course at Mt. San Jacinto College in southern California. My lectures have typically focused on real world lessons on using Scrum to build software.
  

• X – No Bachelor’s Degree. I have 2 associate’s degrees (double major: one associates of science degree focused on digital design / multimedia and one associate of arts degree focused on humanities ). In my entire career, my experience has compensated for not having a formal under-grad degree. Most of my peers, in most of my roles tend to have Masters or PhD’s. Recently I learned that a global company (after reaching out to me for multiple roles) with a large campus/presence here in the DFW area has a hard rule requiring a bachelor’s degree. Bummer.

What am I looking for:

• Sr. Director / VP of Software Engineering. While I’m comfortable in an individual contributor or people leader role, most of what I’ve been exploring are positions where I can have a bit larger impact – helping to lead and train up a larger group of people. Depending on the size of the company, the “title” might look very different. I’m honestly less concerned with the title – and more focused on the role and impact that I’ll be having.
  
• Medium to Large Companies. Most of my career has been in some of the largest companies in the world (Microsoft, Sabre, Charles Schwab, etc). I’m very comfortable with smaller start-up companies, but typicaly I prefer the health insurance of other bennefits at larger companies. I still have 4 kids, and so the quality of the health insurance is still really important to me.
  
• OK with Start Ups. While I’ve mostly worked for fortune 100 companies, when I left Microsoft, I was employee #7 at Improving Enterprises, and was 1 of about 40 people working at Linux Academy. To join a start up, I’m typically looking for other benenfits to offset the work.. think equity, close to home or critical mission/purpose.
  
• Making an Impact. The farther in my career I get, the more important this tends to be. I like to make a positive impact. I like when the company I work for is making a positive impact. When my role is impacting others – and I deally both.

More details and context?

Check out the last time I was on the market (about 8 years ago). Let’s connect!
For comments, please add those directly to my LinkedIn post. Thanks!

Last September I had the priveledge of participating in a one-day Dallas conference hostd by Harness, the release automation software company. I was invited to share some of my observations and insights on developer productivity and AI (think CoPilots and Vibe Coding) at the “How to Drive Developer Productivity with AI” panel. I wanted to thank my other panelists John Arroyo, Sudha Venugopalan and special thanks to the excellent panel facilitator Martin Reynolds – great work cat wrangling on stage!

I should also call out two of my favorite session speakers. Nick Durkin – who has a great stage present and way a structuring engaging walk throughs. Jyoti Bansal – very powerful keynote – and great person who really is working to make engineering better across the industry. Thank you!

I highly recomend these {unscripted} events – great time and excellent information.

Join the conversation over on LinkedIn!

TL,DR;
Check my daughter’s Go Fund Me for the detailed updates and to contribute if you’re able.
Thank you . https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kaitlyn-heal-postsurgery-and-recovery-costs

I don’t like saying the last 6 weeks have been horrible. Because I know many other people have had it so much worse – and despite everything – we have so much to be thankful and grateful for.

I’m reminded of (and encouraged by?) the words of Job “should we expect only good from God?” (Job 2:10). As if from the depths Job is calling out “Life happens – keep going!”

6  weeks ago, the week before Thanksgiving, my Mom lost her battle to cancer. I haven’t talked about it much (to anyone). We knew we were heading into a trying season. I had previously discussed with my Mom’s husband (a truly wonderful person – that we are incredibly thankful for) that – if anything were to happen with my Mom before the end of the year – we would hold off on the memorial service until Jan. So, I’ve pushed off my grief – and processing until then. (Who can say if this is a healthy coping strategy, but it’s what’s working for me – for now).

Then – the day after Thanksgiving half our family flew to New York for an intensive, and life changing surgery that one of my daughters desperately needed. We were told – post surgical recovery could be as fast as 10 or as long as 21 days – yikes hard to imagine three whole weeks in another town/state/location living and working from a hotel while your daughter recovers in a hospital.

(…continued from Linkedin)

The short update: The 6-hour, intensive surgery went well. Everything that needed to be bolted in place was bolted properly and all indications are for a positive outcome. (much to be thankful for). The recovery has been challenging.

Longer update: Coming out of sedation – my daughter could not feel or use her entire left side. (arm, stomach, leg). We’re told this is not entirely uncommon, but you can imagine our concern coming out of a spine & skull surgery.

• 2 days after surgery, my daughter was moved out of ICU and into the spine unit. (grateful)
• 4 weeks later (2 nights back), from the spine unit to in-patient rehab. (grateful)
• The current plan is 2 more weeks in rehab (here in New York City) while she relearns how to use her left leg and arm and how to function day to day with her current challenges.

When we set out for New York, we really didn’t think we’d be here through Christmas and certainly not into the new year. Despite the setbacks – and the pain of watching my daughter struggle with recovery, an inability to use her leg – and everything that entails, my wife with sleepless nights advocating for her along the way, being in an unfamiliar city with difficult surroundings. This is the adventure we’ve been called to (being parents) – we still have had so much to be thankful for.

I don’t want to sound like it’s been all bad, or that it’s been all good. This has been the most emotional roller coaster of our lives. With successes and joy mixed with pain – real pain and sadness and frustration and so many other emotions and physical toil. We’re also not suffering in a war zone. We’re in one of the greatest cities in the world. We have running water, electricity, a place to sleep and Uber Eats. I’m able to work remotely, and I have several Schwab offices I’m able to work from throughout the week. But it has been hard – really HARD. I’ve included many pictures below and in this post’s title from the last month to help show some of the ups and downs. Joy and struggle.

Two days ago was a good day. My daughter was experiencing some success in rehab and then one of her lifelong friends surprised her with a visit and they even had a sort of girl’s night in the hospital. (thankful). Today was hard – my daughter passed out (like a light switch clicking) during rehab and was dropped on the PT table hitting her head. Talk about setbacks. Ups and downs.

Often it feels like 3 steps forward.. 2 steps back.. then 2 more steps back... then forward again. Repeat. At least overall – we’re moving in the right direction (thankfull). We’ve had countless friends reach out to offer support, send care packages, drop everything to pick me up last minute from the airport, and even contribute things like uber eats gift cards and airline miles (it all helps – thank you, thank you all so much!).

• I’m so thankful for the nearly 50 people that have already financially helped. This completely blows me away and fills me with gratitude every day – thank you all.
  https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kaitlyn-heal-postsurgery-and-recovery-costs  (grateful)
• Many of our friends from our church small group (Milestone Church) sent care packages that made for a much more festive Christmas despite everything else. (grateful)
• Use of her left arm – even if it’s limited. Today Kaitlyn’s right arm has 65 lbs. of strength, while her left arm has 5 lbs. of strength – still, we’re grateful or those 5lbs!
• For my family – even though we were apart for yet another Christmas (last year 3 of us were visiting my mom for the last time) – we’re pulling through this season together.
• Health Insurance (we’ve hit our max out of pocket several years in a row now! )
• Recovering from Norovirus. Seriously, Sunday night my youngest and I both got hit with the Norovirus. It’s truly awful (I won’t give details, but you can google it). I would say it’s more intense that Covid – but thankfully – more short lived. I’m so thankful to be passed that and recovering!
• The hospital staff. They have all been amazing. No 20-year-old girl wants to spend Christmas or New Years wheelchair bound, stuck in a hospital room for a month, needing assistance for even through most basic things while she recovers. It’s hard. And the staff here have been with us each step of the way. We’re thankful for them and all they do.
• I’m also so very thankful to my company (Charles Schwab) and my team. They have been very gracious and accommodating, allowing me to work from multiple offices here in New York. It’s given me a chance to see how some of our technology is directly used in the field, and to experience directly some of our offices that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to know. Truly, everyone here has been so very supportive. (grateful)

As you can imagine – living from a hotel next to a hospital in Manhattan for over 6 weeks was not in our plans or budget for the year. I know many people are struggling – but if your able to participate, any contribution is truly appreciated. Even more… please keep praying for my daughter’s healing and recovery so we can get her home.

Thank you all.  (https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kaitlyn-heal-postsurgery-and-recovery-costs)

Life happens – we keep going!

Please visit the LinkedIn article to comment.

Update! (1/9/2025)

Since posting, over 75 additional people have contributed! We’re completely blown away. Seriously, our family is overwhelmed with gratitude. Thank you all so much. With all these contributions, we hit our GoFundMe goal – which will cover about half of our expenses in New York. This helps more than we can say. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Kaitlyn’s come home date is locked in! This is the most incredible news, and I wanted to share it here. We finally have a come home date. Next Tuesday – 1/14/2025 – we will all be flying home from New York. This has been an exhausting journey. I can’t even explain the sense of relief it will be to have our whole family back in one state and close to each other. Kaitlyn will continue to recover and do rehab therapy from here. There is still a long road ahead of us, but at least it will be from our own beds!

Additional medical info and details

I’m adding some additional context to what my daughter has been dealing with for those that are curious and have been asking.

EDS – Ehlers-Danlos syndromes – this is the overarching condition that my daughter is dealing with. Everything else falls under the EDS umbrella or is related to EDS. No surgery or treatment will cure EDS. This is a connectivity disorder that affects everything else in her life. It’s inherited, genetic, and degenerative. What is EDS | WikiPedia | WebMD | Mayo Clinic

Chiari Malformation – This is the reason Kaitlyn had two brain surgeries in June of 2023. A Chiari malformation basically means your brain is too big for your skull. To treat this condition, a permanent soft spot is created in the back of your skull and part of your skull and C1 vertebrae are removed. We hoped (at the time) this would significantly help with Kaitlyn’s pain and symptoms. Unfortunately, the Chiari surgery ended up exasperating the CCI. Addressing the CCI is the reason we’re in New York now.
WikiPedia | Mayo Clinic |

CCI – Craniocervical Instability – This is the connection between the spine and the skull. For people without EDS/CCI – our soft tissues hold everything together, lined up tightly. For people with CCI, the brain and vertebrae sort of slide around some when they move. This creates a ton of issues all related to the spinal cord and related nerves getting pitched and pushed in ways they’re not supposed to be.

The surgery in New York was specifically to address Kaitlyn’s CCI. They fused her skull to her C2 and C3 vertibrae. It’s a permanent and complete fusion – meaning that for the rest of her life, Kaitlyn will not be able to move any of the joints in that part of her neck and head at all. The hope is that this will drastically inprove Kaitlyn’s quality of life by reducing or eliminating many of the symptons and pain caused by the CCI. What is CCI | EDS Clinic

So now you know more about the conditions that are affecting our daughter’s life and some of what we are trying to do to help address those challenges. Thanks you for reading, being interested and involved – and again, thank you so much for your prayers and support!

Please visit the LinkedIn article to comment. More Images on OneDrive