Speaking

Interested in having me talk about language, words, dictionaries, Javascript, creativity, or dresses? Or something else entirely? Contact me.

I am also available to run “create your own new word” workshops, for groups of up to 30 people. (See a writeup from a workshop at the Smithsonian Institution.)

General Talks

• TED, 2007
• TEDxYouth@Castilleja
• TEDYouth, 2014
• iSummit, 2008
• Big Ideas Fest, 2011
• Thinking Digital 2014, 2012
• XOXO, 2014
• TED, 2015
• TED, 2016

Technical Talks

• “The Linguistics of Javascript”, Fluent, 2015
• “Words as Tools”, Webstock, 2015
• “You need an API: Now what?”, JAMstack 2017
• “Rapid API Prototyping with LoopBack”, CloudFoundry 2017
• “Build an API in 20 minutes with Loopback”, SacJS 2017
• “Supporting beginners: growing developers while growing your API”, DevRelCon SF, 2017
• “Tuning Elasticsearch for English-Language Precision”, Strange Loop, 2017
• “Hooray for Arrays! Tips and Tricks for JavaScript’s Best Object”, NodeJSInteractive, Oct 15, 2017
• “Yelling at Robots: The End of Language As We Know It?", Social Media Week, March 2017
• “Making the implicit explicit”, DevRelCon London 2017
• “LoopBack at Wordnik”, JSLA April 7, 2018
• “Everything you need to know about OpenAPI 3.0 in ten minutes or less”, LeadDev NY, 2018
• “What Writing Dictionaries Taught Me about Writing Documentation”, WriteTheDocs Portland 2018
• “User research for dev rel: asking the right questions”, DevXCon SF, 2018
• “Documentation as practical empathy”, DevRelCon London 2018
• “Leveraging OpenAPI for Awesome APIs”, Kong, 2019
• “The More Language Changes”, NamesCon, 2019
• “Keynote: docs docs docs”, gRPC Conf 2020, August 5, 2020
• “5 simple things you can do to improve OSS docs”, Google Open Source Live, October 5, 2020
• “Docs Advocacy is Dev Advocacy”, DevRelCon Earth, 2020
• “The Lazy Dev’s Guide to Documentation”, JSLA, May 14, 2021
• “Documentation makes a difference: how to create and maintain documentation in OSS”, Upstream 2021, June 8, 2021

Audio

• New Words of 2005 and Beyond, Morning Edition, December 2005
• The Great American Scoundrel, To The Best Of Our Knowledge, January 6, 2013
• How to Use the Word ‘Algorithm’ with Confidence, Slack Single Servings, September 4, 2015
• http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/193611/chai-fashion-2, Unorthodox from Tablet Magazine, September 16, 2015
• My Feed on RN Drive, ABC Radio Australia, January 29, 2016
• Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, WMCLive, February 27, 2016
• Flash Forward EPISODE 12: OMNIBOT, Flash Forward Podcast, May 3, 2016
• Creative Life Live, August 2016
• Should We … Be Nice?, Should We? Podcast, December 2016
• Technical Definitions: A conversation with Wordnik’s founder Erin McKean, Postlight, May 28, 2019
• Empathy in Language, You, Me, Empathy, November 2019
• Intentional Jargon and Technical Documentation (API The Docs Podcast, November 2, 2020)
• Junior to Senior with David Guttman, Junior To Senior, June 21, 2021

Random TV clips

• Redefining the Dictionary, Press:Here, July 22, 2011
• World of Weird Words, WTTW, April 1, 2015