Paul Fenwick
Paul Fenwick is an internationally acclaimed public speaker, developer, and educator. Paul is well known for presenting on a diverse range of topics including privacy, neuroscience and neuroethics, Klingon programming, open source, depression and mental health, the Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network, and minesweeper automation. His dynamic presentation style and quirky humour has delighted audiences worldwide.
Montreal 2024 sessions
How to write beautiful regular expressions in any language!
English session - Beginner
Regular expressions allow for fast and accurate pattern matching and manipulation, but it's easy to view them as dense, dark magic, but they don't have to be!
In this talk for all skill levels and platforms, we'll examine some regexp fundamentals, but also the most important tools for beautiful, reusable regexps, including comments, meaningful whitespace, pattern naming, live debugging, and testing. Your regexps can be beautiful and readable!
The process of enshittification - How good platforms go bad
English session - Beginner
Did it seem like software platforms used to be better in the past? That's not just nostalgia, they *were* better. Platforms were more intuitive, better suited for user-needs, less invasive of privacy, and easier to use.
In this talk we'll examine (with examples) the process of 'enshittification', a term coined by Cory Doctorow for platform decay—where services become progressively worse to maximise profit—and how to avoid it happening to you.
