| layout | page |
|---|---|
| title | Presentations |
| permalink | /presentations/ |
| description | Talks and runnable decks by David Silva — modular Rails and Rails engines, AI-directed agents for refactors and UX review, building a roguelike from scratch, and shipping solo as a studio of one. |
| image | /img/og-default.png |
An engineering operating system — a Claude Code plugin that handles the work around the code: the roles, skills, gates and contracts that turn a feature idea into shipped, defensible software without skipping a discipline. One engineer wearing every hat, with a producer keeping them coherent — proven by deterministic gates and per-skill evals, and a loop that compounds each cycle's learning into the next.
How a single Claude Code session benefits from firm. A session is fast, capable — and amnesiac: it rushes to code, skips the disciplines a senior wouldn't, and forgets the lesson when the context window closes. A walk through one session showing where firm injects discipline at the moment it matters, catches what a diff hides, and writes the lesson back so the next session starts ahead. Companion to firm.
Shipping a game (and a novel) as a studio of one — and the part that couldn't be synthesised. What it is to be a solo indie developer in 2026 directing a coached AI team across every discipline, told through Filed Under No One and the studio behind it, DS Laboratory.
The modular monolith, in your repo — boilerplate gone, boundaries enforced, you still the architect. The story from a Rails architecture book to Seams, a CLI that generates real, pre-wired Rails engines into your own repo. Based on Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game.
View presentation · 5-minute lightning version
Turning a Rails monolith into a runnable refactor epic — diagnosis, a phased plan, a dependency graph, sequenced sub-issues, safe stopping points, and a Definition of Done — with every finding cited to a named authority. A walk through real findings from real codebases. Based on Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game.
A code review for your live UX. Point it at a URL and five specialist agents — performance, accessibility, user journeys, visual hierarchy, and copy — audit it in parallel; a synthesis pass returns one verdict (🟢 ship / 🟡 worth fixing / 🔴 don't ship) with the evidence behind it. Invoked as /ux-audit <url>.
A talk on using Rails Engines to decompose monoliths without reaching for microservices. Based on Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game.
A talk on ECS architecture, procedural generation, and the 5-year journey of building a complete roguelike game in pure Ruby. Based on Building Your Own Roguelike: A Practical Guide.