I recently spoke at RevolutionConf in Virginia Beach, VA. It was the inaugural event for the conference, and my first time speaking at a conference, so I figured I’d write a few words about it.

RevolutionConf logo

My talk was about implementing motion detection with JavaScript. I’ve published it in article form, if you want to check it out.

Truth be told, I was super nervous in the weeks leading up to the conference. Public speaking seemed like a natural step after writing in this blog for so long, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. But once I got to the venue, checked out the conference rooms and had a chance to meet some folks, the nervousness completely subsided. It just felt like a bunch of people, myself included, excited to share their craft and learn stuff.

Will Boyd speaking at RevolutionConf

A couple highlights from some of the sessions:

  • Kevin Jones had an great talk on the history of cryptography and how that history is repeating itself. Really interesting stuff.
  • David Bates’s talk was titled “How to Make IoT Devices Speak with Fire”. I thought the title was figurative. No, he literally showed us how to hook up flame throwers to remote access IoT devices.
  • Brent Schooley gave a primer on using Swift, which I was happy to see. From my personal (and short-lived) experience as an iOS developer using Objective-C… Yeah, Swift looks nice.
  • Pawel Szymczykowski’s talk embodied the sort of gleeful “let’s take this to the extreme” spirit that’s so fun to watch. What started as a little competition in Crossy Road led to him building a touchscreen-tapping robot guided by computer vision.
  • Julia Gao gave a talk on bringing functional programming into your front-end development. A few of my coworkers are crazy-go-nuts over functional programming, so it was nice to finally see what they’re going on about.

All things considered, I really liked RevolutionConf 2016. Beyond the talks, the people were cool, happy hours were fun, and the other speakers I chatted with were really supportive. I hope to see everyone again at RevolutionConf 2017.