$ ls ~/talks
Speaking
Slides, notes and an overview from some of the talks I’ve given.
- Web Unleashed 2026 · Toronto, ON Everyone is Frustrated: A Candid Conversation About Tech Hiring A panel with the people applying and the people screening, on what tech hiring really evaluates in 2026 and what each side can do differently.
- Halihax · Halifax, NS Our Password Problem Passwords are hard to remember, easy to steal, and most people still skip 2FA. Passkeys fix a lot of that: what they are, how WebAuthn works, and the catches.
- REDspace Tech Share WordPress in 30 Minutes …or your pizza is free. WordPress from a developer's point of view: the five building blocks (hooks, posts, taxonomies, meta and the REST API) and which plugins are worth it.
- REDspace Tech Share Modern CSS Selectors I can :has() parent? The sibling combinators I love, :where() and :is() and how they change specificity, and :has(), the parent selector we waited years for.
- REDspace Tech Share Font Don'ts The most common ways web fonts go wrong: blocking embeds, faux bold, fuzzy rendering, and why variable fonts are the next step.
- Web Unleashed 2019 · Toronto, ON Profiling JavaScript Performance A beginner's tour of the Chrome profiler: finding bottlenecks in your JavaScript without leaning on console.log.
- Web Unleashed 2018 · Toronto, ON We All Live in a Yellow (Serverless) Submarine What "serverless" actually means for web developers: why you'd use it, when it fits, when it doesn't, and a live demo of a serverless meme generator.
- REDspace Tech Share React Server-Side Rendering with PHP Server-side rendering React from a PHP server, by embedding Google's V8 engine with V8Js. I don't know why either.
- Web Unleashed 2017 · Toronto, ON A Very Public and Overdue Funeral for jQuery A fond and somewhat embarrassing goodbye to jQuery, and the modern browser APIs you can use instead, today.
- REDspace Tech Share Three Things You Might Not Know About CSS Browsers read selectors right to left, CSS can count, and the Fab Four technique makes emails responsive without media queries.
- REDspace Tech Share Recursion & JavaScript: WTF Why deep recursion blows the stack in JavaScript, the setTimeout trick that gets around it, and where tail call optimization actually stood.
- Web Unleashed 2016 · Toronto, ON Performance: Beyond Your Portfolio Google's RAIL model for what fast feels like, quick wins you can ship today, and how HTTP/2 changes the way the web is delivered.
- COLLIDE 2015 · Halifax, NS Understanding HTTP & Web Performance Back to the roots of the web: how HTTP works, how to measure performance, and creative ways to use the protocol to make apps faster.
$ book --speaker luke
Planning an event? I’ll bring the talk.
Developer experience, team culture, or anything techy.