Frequently Asked Questions

Will you give a talk at my conference/business/class?

I am happy to give talks at a variety of venues. Some of my more popular talks have been on the economics of software development, based on the knowledge I have gained from running an online payment system for iOS software (Cydia). However, I am also quite happy to give talks on technical subjects related to code modification (such as using Substrate or Cycript to accomplish various hacks) or on low-level details of the Objective-C runtime.

That said, I sadly am not in a line of work where I can predict my schedule very far in advance. I thereby will likely prefer to get things booked later (closer to the actual event) than might normally be expected. Also, I honestly hate travelling; so, with a few exceptions (JailbreakCon, 360|iDev, etc.), I am unlikely to want to travel outside of the range "California or Las Vegas" (a range which I consider easily drivable within, as I am centrally located).

I also do not like doing talks that are recorded or streamed (but will under special circumstances): one of the things I consider critical to the success of a talk is to be able to tailor the jargon, humor, formality, and coverage to the specific audience at hand; I thereby tend to spend some time before giving a talk trying to meet as many people at the event as I can, so I can mentally rearrange my presentation. Recording or streaming a talk generally ruins this ability :(.

Given these (I hope reasonable) constraints, if you are still interested in having me give a talk, please contact me via e-mail (and explicitly say in your subject that this is regarding a talk). Specify the location, make it clear that you are not intending to record/stream it ;P, and tell me what the timing is that you are expecting. I will also want to know what the general demographic of the audience is, and what you think they want to hear about.

An example (please, Google, send this one ;P): "Hello. I am the conference organizer for Google I/O. We honestly do not know the date of our conference yet, but we usually target May/June. We were hoping you would explain to people why you felt Substrate was interesting, and how they can build their own extensions. We see you've been to our conference before, and thereby know the audience. (We record all talks and post them on our YouTube channel.)"

I also will do businesses: "I am the regional sales director for Expensia. We are currently looking into launching an iPhone application, but we are not certain how to best monetize it. We realize you normally do talks like this at conferences, but we were wondering if you're willing to give a talk to our team about monetization in the App Store. We are located in Los Angeles, and are very flexible with regards to timing. (No, we won't record you ;P.)"

Or education: "I am a teacher for Santa Gregoria High School in San Francisco. I was wondering if you would give a talk to my AP Computer Science class about how people use bugs in software to develop exploits such as the iOS 5.0 jailbreak. My class meets on Mondays and Thursdays, at 11:00AM. As we are currently covering memory management, I was hoping you might have some time in the next couple weeks. (No, we won't record you ;P.)"