Steven Hicks

In the last couple years, I've given over 20 talks at local meetups and code camps, and conferences throughout the Midwest. Here are 10 tips for preparing talks.

Rejection feels bad. Sometimes I forget how to deal with it. Here are some of the strategies I keep forgetting.

2017 was awesome! I hit the speaker circuit hard. I'm hoping for a great 2018 as well!

What can we learn about testing from a Russian playwright that's been dead for over 100 years?

I wanted to speak more in 2017. Looks like I'm getting my wish!

When unit testing your ES2015 code, you'll probably want to mock dependencies. My team had been tolerating some test-induced damage to our code, in order to allow mocking of ES2015 module exports. But recently we discovered a feature of ES2015 modules that allowed us eliminate the test-induced damage.

2016 was a ...year that happened. At a personal level, I had a great 2016.

The project I'm currently working on requires a spreadsheet to be imported into the database. SSIS seemed like the logical solution to this. Then the honeymoon ended, and I found out SSIS was stealing my money and slowly poisoning me. Here are some other things SSIS does wrong!

October was a crazy month! Aside from being peak soccer season for my kids, I had two speaking engagements, and helped organize a conference.

Some advice and resources to help someone get started with TDD.

A coworker recently asked me to send some good resources for introducing a team to TDD. I thought the internet was a good place to put it.

I got to present a variation of my static site generator talk at Chicago Coder Conference this year. Here are the slides!

Setting up a React project proved to be a challenge for me the first time I tried to learn it. It went a little better the second time around.

I am in the market for a new MV* framework in Javascript. I'm not totally sold on Angular 2 or React, but I think Ember looks neat.

I recently presented at MKE Web Pros, about static site generators. I put together some slides and notes.