Castles Made of Sand

The Attendant — a short film about the year at the Seattle Convention Center.

What it is

A storytelling keynote about how one person writing about disruptive technology handled its arrival in his own career.

It opens on schemas — the set of tables underneath a system, the part that is hard to change because everything else assumes it will stay put — and on the way a career quietly becomes one. From there it goes somewhere the usual advice about embracing change does not: what it actually looked like, what did not work first, and what turned out to be worth more than the specialty.

The arc

Twenty years explaining technology to the people who had to make decisions about it, five of them on staff at a trade publication and fifteen independent. The change, when it came, was availability: the same capability arriving in front of everyone at once. Then a year at the Seattle Convention Center, taken deliberately as the job least likely to be automated. Then leaving it, and going back to where it started, which was databases: the first part-time job, the college major, the first full-time job. Low-code first, then Python and test-driven development, then AI. What came out of that runs several things now.

The talk

The talk, delivered at Spark Live 2026 — NSA Northwest, Seattle.

What came out of it first

Where it landed

Built since, and all of it running.

Who it’s for

• Rooms in the middle of it. Professionals watching their own specialty get cheaper, who have heard enough about embracing change and would like an account from somebody further down the road.
• Associations and chapters. Membership organizations whose members are asking what happens next, and would rather have one person’s account than a forecast.
• Builders. A different emphasis — less on what it felt like, more on what compounded, and in what order.