Bio
Kerri Miller is a Software Developer and Team Lead based in the Pacific Northwest. She has worked at enterprise companies, international ad agencies, boutique consultancies, start-ups, mentors and teaches students, and finds time to work on Open Source projects. Having an insatiable curiosity, she has worked as a lighting designer, marionette puppeteer, sous chef, and professional poker player, and enjoys hiking, collecting Vespas, and working with glass.
My Talks
5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Programming
As an instructor and mentor with 20+ years of experience, I’m frequently asked for career advice by women just entering the field. This talk is a summary of the advice I give them, and what I wish ...
Beyond Good and ORMs: Uncovering The Hidden Features of Your Database
ORMs such as ActiveRecord are fabulous tools that have improved the speed at which we're able to develop working, shippable products, but at the cost of stunting our collective knowledge about the ...
Code Review Like Its Your Job (Because It Is)
Code reviews are consistently shown to improve the quality of code, reduce the rate of defects, and spread knowledge about the codebase across a team. So why do so many pull requests can sit for da...
Crescent Wrenches and Debuggers: Building Your Own Toolkit For Rational Inquiry
Understanding the ways that human-built systems fail begins with having a structure for inquiring about the nature of the failure, and of the fallacies that humans bring to the process.
It's Two-Headed Turtles All The Way Down: An Introduction to Mutation Testing
What if we could measure the amount of code that could be changed and our tests would still pass? That's mutation testing, and we'll explore how we can use it to improve the code and tests that we...
Software Archeology and The Code Of Doom
This is a workshop/live code talk, where I'll take a large open-source Rails project and demonstrate using code metrics, analysis, and visualization tools to uncover secrets of the code, find targe...
The Minimum Viable Conference
Whether you’re planning a multi-day conference, a monthly meetup, or just a one-time get-together for your office, you'll find here a handy list of DOs and DONTs, based on the experiences of myself...