Talks

I occasionally present conference sessions on topics pertaining to Mac client platform engineering and software distribution automation.

  • Mac Admins Podcast: Episode #365
    May 27, 2024
    I was one of three guests on this episode, which was recorded live at MacAD.UK in Brighton, UK. We discussed our favorite parts of the conference and shared our thoughts on the future of Mac device management.
  • Escrow Buddy: A Tool for Escrowing Missing FileVault Recovery Keys
    May 24, 2024MacAD.UK Conference, Brighton, UK
    At the MacAD.UK conference in Brighton, I continued spreading the word about how Escrow Buddy can be used by MDM administrators to remediate missing FileVault keys.
  • Escrow Buddy: A Tool for Escrowing Missing FileVault Recovery Keys
    September 21, 2023Jamf Nation User Conference, Austin, TX
    In this in-person session at the Austin Convention Center, I covered the reasons FileVault recovery keys might be missing from company or school MDMs, shared context around pitfalls of previous workflows, and introduced Escrow Buddy as a scalable solution for modern Mac admins.
  • Mac Admins Podcast: Episode #328
    August 14, 2023
    I was honored to be the guest on episode 328 of the Mac Admins Podcast. We chatted about many projects I’ve been involved in, including Escrow Buddy, Recipe Robot, and AutoPkgr.
  • Mac Admins Open Source Panel
    July 19, 2023MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    A panel conversation with board members of the Mac Admins Foundation and founding members of the Mac Admins Open Source group.
  • AutoPkg in Depth: Understanding, Selecting, Creating, and Maintaining Recipes
    July 18, 2023MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    A six-hour workshop co-presented with Anthony Reimer on the topic of AutoPkg recipe creation, collaboration, and maintenance. Helped Mac admins of varying experience read and understand AutoPkg recipes, run and maintain trust on collections of recipes, and create, test, and share new recipes.
  • Linters, Hooks, and Pipelines: Automation to Save Your Bacon
    July 10, 2019MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    Deep-dive discussion of three dev ops tools that Mac admins may find useful, including example usage of the shellcheck and pylint linters, various pre-commit hooks, and GitLab CI/CD automation.
  • Intro to Pre-Commit
    June 12, 2019MacDevOpsYVR Conference, Vancouver, Canada
    Introduction to the pre-commit framework and my accompanying pre-commit-macadmin collection of hooks, which can help Mac admins perform simple validation on their code before committing changes.
  • How (Not) To Do Bad Things With AutoPkg
    July 12, 2017MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    Discussed several possible ways to exploit AutoPkg to deliver unexpected or malicious payloads, and gave concrete examples of how IT administrators should prevent these problems.
  • Managing Munki: Intelligent Practices for Structuring, Maintaining, and Collaborating
    June 29, 2016MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    Together with Shea Craig, discussed methods, tools, and practices that promote the use of Munki as a self-documenting, scalable, and thoughtfully designed solution for managing Mac software deployment.
  • Writing Better AutoPkg Recipes With The Help Of Recipe Robot
    June 28, 2016MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, State College, PA
    Together with Shea Craig, demonstrated how Recipe Robot can be used to create new AutoPkg recipes, audit existing recipes, and assist in the creation of child recipes. Promoted increased collaboration among AutoPkg recipe authors.
  • Intro to Recipe Robot
    June 20, 2016MacDevOpsYVR Conference, Vancouver, Canada
    This brief talk introduced Mac admins to Recipe Robot, a tool that helps create AutoPkg recipes for basic Mac apps.
  • How (Not) To Do Bad Things With AutoPkg
    June 20, 2016MacDevOpsYVR Conference, Vancouver, Canada
    Early version of the talk I also presented at MacAD UK 2016 and PSU MacAdmins 2017.
  • How (Not) To Do Bad Things With AutoPkg
    February 10, 2016MacAD UK Conference, London, UK
    Early version of the talk I also presented at MacDevOpsYVR 2016 and PSU MacAdmins 2017. Video not available.
  • Reissuing FileVault Keys with Jamf
    January 27, 2015MacBrained Meetup at Pinterest, San Francisco, CA
    Introduced a workflow that Jamf administrators could use to reissue and escrow FileVault recovery keys. In 2023, this workflow was superseded by another project I created, Escrow Buddy.
  • Auto Update Magic
    October 22, 2014Jamf Nation User Conference, Minneapolis, MN
    Introduced and demonstrated new features in AutoPkgr that allow it to easily integrate with Jamf Pro for the purpose of automatically distributing software updates to Mac endpoints.