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.
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.
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.