Talks and Writing
/ 4 min read
Hi! I’m Scott. I’ve worked as various exciting variants of a code-pusher since who-knows-when. These days I work as a Developer Advocate @ Datadog. I live in Switzerland in the rather scenic Berner Oberland.
These days I focus on the technical foundations of software engineering - what does it take to build high-quality software, how can we best use our tools and languages, and how can an awareness of the lower levels of the stack help? I believe that knowledge of these foundational layers influences high-level design and engineering more than we often acknowledge, and I strive to make this understanding more approachable. I’m currently working primarily with Java, Rust, and eBPF.
Talks
Upcoming
- Back to Basics: Crafting Quality Software in the Age of Complexity at Voxxed Days Thessaloniki, 8th November, 2025
- Moving Out of Systems Programming into Kubernetes: is it Time to Adopt Rust? at Guild42, with Ramon Lopez Narvaez, 3rd November, 2025
Past
- Kubernetes-Native Observability in the Cloud With AWS (webinar) with Sascha Möllering, 9th September, 2025
- Back to Basics: Crafting Quality Software in the Age of Complexity at Porto Tech Hub Conference 2025, 7th October, 2025
- Back to Basics: Crafting Quality Software in the Age of Complexity at AWS Summit Zürich, 11th September, 2025
- Back to Basics: Crafting Quality Software in the Age of Complexity at Java User Group Zürich, 1st September, 2025
- The Horrors That Lurk: Understanding the Linux Compiler Landscape for Developers at Voxxed Days Luxembourg, Thursday, June 19th, 2025
- From Code to Cluster: Deploying and Observing Apps on Amazon EKS at AWS Community Day Switzerland with Kevin Nash, Thursdaay 22nd May 2025
- Moving out of systems programming into Kubernetes: is it time to swap golang for Rust ? at Cloud Native Days Oslo, with Ramon Lopez Narvaez, Thursday, March 13th, 2025
- The Horrors That Lurk: Understanding the Linux Compiler Landscape for Developers at Voxxed Days Zürich (video), Tuesday, March 25th, 2025
- Chalk Talk: Java Serverless Performance Tuning at AWS Builders Day Zürich 2024
- Building event driven applications on AWS with Jerome Van Der Linden at AWS Swiss Cloud Day 2023
… as well as a myriad of meetups and local events over the last few years.
Writing
- A deep dive into Java garbage collectors (Datadog, October 2025)
- How to monitor your Rust applications with OpenTelemetry (Datadog, January 2025)
- Understanding GitOps: key principles and components for Kubernetes environments (Datadog, January 2025)
- Java on containers: a guide to efficient deployment (Datadog, March 2025)
- We vibe coded a path tracer: Here’s how we used static and dynamic analysis to fix it (Datadog, August 2025)
- A series on choosing between adopting Rust, Java and Quarkus and Golang for modern application development
- Managing Asynchronous Workflows with a REST API (AWS, May 2021)
Open Source
- cargo-pup author - a tool for architectural linting in Rust projects, leveraging
rustc’s extensability to analyse crates against an architectural specification.
- opentelemetry-rust reviewer (January 2025 - present) - the main way of getting observability data (logs/traces/metrics) out of Rust systems
- Powertools for AWS Lambda (Java) maintainer (January 2023 to July 2024) - a developer toolkit implementing serverless best practices for Java on AWS Lambda.
- awslabs/staticwebsite-cli author - a simple CLI to deploy static websites to AWS using IaC
- minderbinder author - an eBPF tool to inject controlled failures into applications under test
… as well as a pile of other bits and pieces on the datadog, AWS, and personal GitHub orgs.