Talks

I like to attend conferences and on some occasions I have given talks. Here’s a list of them:

Crunching Data to Catch Fraud

Veriff’s fraud team detects and blocks fraud by looking for patterns in the millions of incoming verifications. To be able to make good decisions in a fraction of a second, their team needs fast access to lots of data. Veriff’s automatic solutions can recognise known patterns of fraud, but they also need to manually add new rules on the fly when they recognize new attacks. In this talk, Rivo, who is a fraud team lead at Veriff will show how his team built a solution for quickly accessing that data at scale and running analytical queries on it. The result powers both their real-time decision making, as well as the tools for manually finding the patterns and blocking them.

Veriff’s Journey to Structured Logging

Good application logs make debugging issues much easier, but they come with limitations. The usual human-readable prose is hard to parse, search, and correlate. We’ll look at how structured logs and JSON output make your life easier, get metrics straight out of the logs, and see how Veriff’s automation team is using it all in practice.

Devclub.ee #80 (video), 2020.01.30

Why Machine Learning isn’t Scary

Machine Learning (ML) can seem daunting due to its perceived math requirements. This talk demystifies ML, showing how anyone can train powerful, real-world models without a deep mathematical background. Discover how to leverage existing technologies, pre-trained models, and user-friendly frameworks like Keras and PyTorch. Inspired by the speaker’s own journey from web development to ML in under a year, this session aims to encourage others to explore this accessible field.

PyCaribbean 2019 (slides)

Creating Solid APIs

About creating APIs that other developers love to use. Focuses on the importance of documentation, standards, and other best practices.

See the blog post for a short written overview.

I have presented this on several conferences:

Django and React in Modern Web Apps — PyCon LT 2017

Explains what React is and how to combine it with Django, making your user interface more modular and easier to work with. Also briefly covers creating APIs, and running everything in Docker.

Slides at https://speakerdeck.com/rivolaks/django-and-react-in-modern-web-apps

Docker Lessons from Real-World Projects — DjangoCon Europe 2017

Explores how to use Docker for complex, real-world Django applications.

Slides at https://speakerdeck.com/rivolaks/docker-lessons-from-real-world-projects

Django and Real-time Web — DjangoCon Europe 2015

Looks at how Django keeps up with real-time web and websockets.

Blog post at https://medium.com/@thorgate/introduction-to-real-time-web-with-django-9cf403fc4aa5 , slides at https://www.slideshare.net/rivolaks/django-and-realtime-web and video at https://vimeo.com/135740390