Bio
Adam is not a Fortune 500 CEO, award-winning book author, or Nobel Prize recipient. But, he’s an actor turned software engineer who co-founded ZEAL, a people-centric process-focused consulting company located around the United States. Learn more on the interwebs @CodingZeal @adamcuppy
My Talks
An Open Letter to My Critical Self
A one-person monologue and a reenactment of an open-letter written to my "critical self" from logical self.
Imposter syndrome, self-doubt, binary thinking and the self-fulfilling prophecy of emoti...
Cult(ure)
Embracing individuality and finding alignment as a collective is tough. As a leader, the line between company culture and a dogmatic cult is thin but entirely avoidable.
By the end you'll know: I...
Difficult Conversations
It’s never easy to have a tough conversations, and they never go away. I see a better way.
This talk is a practical course on the triad of human psychology: language, physiology and focus. I’ll wa...
Pair Shaped
What should you expect from a good pair? How do you handle timezones? System configurations? And, what tools should you use to make the experience optimal?
The What's Its and How's Its of Pair ...
Pluck It
When can you benefit from extracting a micro-library? And, how do you build and publish that code into a RubyGem? I'll go through the process, from A to Z.
Rapidly Mapping API Schemas in Ruby
Whether you are using a 3rd party or custom JSON API service, integration into an existing application can be time consuming: Where do you start? How can you build an object relational model that c...
Taming Chaotic Specs: RSpec Design Patterns
Don’t you hate when testing takes 3x as long because your specs are hard to understand? Following a few simple patterns, you can easily take a bloated spec and make it DRY and simple to extend. We ...
The Show Must Go On
60 actors. 50 crew. 3 Directors. 1000 audience members. Only one opening night.
How do dozens of creatives come together and, without fail, produce, rehearse and prepare for one single deadline: o...
What if Shakespeare Wrote Ruby?
Did you know that Shakespeare wrote almost no direction into his plays? No fight direction. No staging. No notes to the songs. Of the 1700 words he created, there was no official dictionary. How di...
Yes! And...
What happens when we drop "No, but..." from our daily interactions or life choices in favor of the #1 rule of improv: Yes, and..?
This talk is not a technical deep dive into the Ruby VM or a walk ...