Now that the holidays are over, it seems like most of the local meetups are getting back to a regular cadence. I made it to three very different events this week – SyPy, The Big Security Debate, and Global CFP Diversity Day!

Sydney Python (or SyPy for short) was held at Optiver Sydney, which is such a great venue. The first speaker was Dr. Paula Sanz-Leon from Sydney Uni talking about pyunicorn. Pyunicorn is a Python package for the advanced analysis and modeling of complex networks. Dr. Sanz-Leon explained that “Anticorrelation and positive correlation are easy to understand, but they aren’t useful to explain nonlinear (chaotic) interactions.” If you want to visualise something complex and chaotic like brainwaves, you need to use recurrence plots.

The next talk was extremely relevant to my interests. Sean Johnson walked us through his efforts to apply home automation to his air conditioner (“because I live in Blacktown, and it’s ridiculously hot when we get home”). This is something I’ve been planning to do myself! Sean used LIRC, a Raspberry Pi, and Apple’s HomeKit to glue it all together.

Sean also walked us through some of the general pitfalls of home automation, including the security risks.

The final talk was Optiver’s own Greg Saunders giving us a gentle introduction to asyncio, a Python module that provides the infrastructure you need for single-threaded asynchronous programming. I was delighted to discover that it’s all about coroutines! (I learned about those from Svetlana Isakova at a YOW! Night last year.)

On Wednesday night I headed to Surry Hills for The Big Security Debate. This special event was run by the Meetup Madness folks who run a number of cloud and devops meetups across Australia. Several hundred people got together to watch offensive and defensive teams go head-to-head in various scenarios devised by some diabolical moderators.

I won’t go through all my tweets – as there were many – but needless to say I had a great time. The hackers had a lot of crowd support through most of the scenarios, just because their devious ideas for hacking into systems were pretty entertaining. (They also did some great trash talking.) A lot of the attacks and countermeasures reminded me of a certain television show…

The red team (aka the hackers) ended up winning the debate and were awarded embroidered hats for their trouble. Hilariously, my tweets on the night were dubbed “the most awesome” and I also won a prize!

We have plenty of Google Homes. I gave this one to my nephew. 🙂

The last event of the week was Global CFP Diversity Day. This global community event was inspired by some workshops that ScotlandJS and ScotlandCSS ran in 2016 to increase the diversity of their speaker pool. I discovered the site last December and realised that no one had volunteered to run one in Sydney. So – what the heck! – I put my name down to organise. General Assembly Sydney offered to host and YOW! came onboard to sponsor snacks.

The Sydney and Melbourne events were the first of 60+ workshops to kick off around the world. Some cities were doing a full day covering the entire process from coming up with an idea through to delivering the talk, but I decided to keep the Sydney event focused on just ideation and abstract writing. I assembled a super team of mentors, several of whom put their hands up to facilitate different activities. It was a lot of fun!

I heard some amazing talk ideas, and I really hope the participants are inspired to submit them to conferences. We finished the day with a group photo and a promise to run a sequel event (covering writing and delivering the talk) if there’s interest.

A few of the attendees were kind enough to leave feedback. This was my favourite:

Incidentally, if you’re looking for CFPs to submit your talk ideas to, the Global Diversity CFP Day folks have created a public list curated by all the different event organisers. For Aussie events, this list from Readify is very handy. And of course it goes without saying that you should be submitting to YOW! Data and YOW! Lambda Jam, both of which have CFPs open right now! 🙂

Other Stuff

  • I really love this CodePen example of encoding raw text into an image using colour. I’ll have to use that to generate a design for a quilt someday…
  • I’ve seen my friend Charlie Gerard demonstrate some very cool “creative coding” projects over the years, many of which involve hardware. (Charlie spoke at the SydJS I curated a couple years back.) But this? This is AMAZING. Charlie is using her brain to control an image in a web browser via Javascript and a wearable EEG. 😲
  • Rebecca Waters from DDD Perth shared this lovely Medium compilation of reactions to last September’s conference.  It included a link to this blog post from Dash Digital which had a glowing review of my keynote.  ☺️

That’s all for this week!