Month: February 2018
-
Shared today on Twitter
RT @glasnt: Rejection emails are going out for @pycon right now. I’ve spoken there the last two years, but was rejected for all my submissi…
@servantofchaos Given that I once created one that was nothing but covers of “Don’t You Want Me Baby,” I shudder to think what that says about my personality.
Blockchain/cryptocurrency spam is really on the rise, huh? Some idiot spammed everyone in the @fendersperth Slack last night, and now another one is posting on heaps of @Meetup groups. 😐
@RyanBErickson Diane wouldn’t change her name! And Lloyd would never expect her to.
Google “Everyone is awesome!” party. ❤️😊🤖 https://t.co/8X826RwTN5 https://t.co/Mo1Xcb6mf8
Everything *is* awesome. Sunshine, tunes, and deep fried ice cream. 🌞🎶🍨❤️ https://t.co/JCwCq4PmDE https://t.co/mqqgSl0Uhs
Being friends with a brewer has its advantages! https://t.co/g6GvLeDqU3 https://t.co/82EZ23ZU5s
Art is happening. https://t.co/4A25kXdcmL https://t.co/yMsAnQcZKo
BUBBLE STORM! https://t.co/DCKuoxRUXV https://t.co/XuXkRO9mah
A rare morning meet up for me – Sydney Data Science Breakfast! @atockar kicking things off with “food for thought.” https://t.co/FTvhrkEz5p
Hearing from @TomerGarzberg from @GRONADE about factories where the workers work 24-7 with no lights, A/C, or running water. Because they’re robots! 🤖 https://t.co/HJM9LYs4nY
According to the Short Term Automation Susceptibility Index, the first jobs to be automated away involve low skill and low variability. @TomerGarzberg https://t.co/BaoCN0pb14
Interesting range of companies represented on the Sydney Data Science Breakfast panel. @Minervaprojects @kpmgaustralia @GRONADE @VergeLabsAI https://t.co/cIe08PwUd2
Low level jobs in accounting and finance are ripe for automation, says @TomerGarzberg, “but I think we’ll always have senior partners.” https://t.co/g5C4BBnzSS
If the only roles for humans are going to be senior roles, how do we train up people for those skills? (Yes, Universal Basic Income has been invoked!) #sydneydata https://t.co/gwM2AmyPMG
“When the stock market is down, crypto currencies are down, what do you invest in? Maybe pitchforks.” #sydneydata https://t.co/rHO0c3J2cf
“In light of all this talk about automation, what should we, as data scientists, do?” – @atockar
“Existentially?!” – @TomerGarzberg
Many chuckles from the crowd… #sydneydata 😂 https://t.co/oUwrnloW57
Wait, was it a full size car or a miniature that just got launched into space? Because if it’s the former – ugh.
@fbz @tcn33 Humans are the worst.
@drkyliesmith The fucking hubris.
@micheinnz Triple ugh.
@MelissaKaulfuss The ego! It boggles the mind.
@afcowie Or, like, something that would have scientific value. Rather than space junk.
@fbz Sorry!! 😂
HOLY MOLY. Suddenly crochet is redeemed. (Thanks @chrisgander!!) https://t.co/bxazu2JKpL
I get that firing a car into space makes for some stunning visuals. But I keep thinking about my visit to Kennedy Space Center in 2007. They had an exhibit that was a wall of like 25 TVs each showing a shuttle launch…
They were all synced up so they all launched at the same time. And as each mission reached orbit, the TV would shut off. After a couple minutes, they were all off except one.
And we stood there in front of the Challenger mission video screen, and I teared up. It makes me tear up still. People gave their LIVES for this, to further our understanding of the universe.
And now we’ve turned it into a commercial. It’s just… awful.
At Kennedy we saw the shuttle, had lunch with an astronaut, flew a shuttle simulation, and went on the multi-axis trainer. The only brand I saw all day: Dippin’ Dots. https://t.co/4OfWGLf9wG
@afcowie I get that private enterprise is making great strides in this area. That’s great. But what if it were Starbucks launching a payload of coffee cups or Taco Bell sending a bunch of burritos? Or worse – Enron or a mining company or someone like that.
@afcowie That fact that most techies are Tesla and Musk fanboys shouldn’t give the commercialisation of this space a pass.
RT @damncabbage: @web_goddess anyway, probably time for this photo again https://t.co/Lwx8BBV2v5
@rbtcollins @afcowie Some look at space and see a market opportunity, another way for humans to market new crap to each other. I just think that’s depressing. We’re going to ruin it the way we ruin everything else.
Yes, exactly this. https://t.co/UG3iKJ4hcO
@darthted Oh god, that must have been… I can’t even come up with a word.
-
Shared today on Twitter
In case you missed it, this week’s roundup of Sydney tech events! https://t.co/9RHN3LzgII
@Gaohmee My brother-in-law has been working on the film. Last year my nieces and nephews got to go onboard the Falcon. 😭
@KiahHickson Living your best life!
While musing on all things Woodcockian last night, managed to sew neckband on my new dress upside down using triple-strength stretch stitch AND THEN overlocked it. 😭 Spent 2 hours unpicking. Reynolds would have been withering.
@leighmgibson Yeah, fixed it! Just took some time and patience.
@lynnlangit 👋 💃 ❤️
Nice big crowd for the first @reactsydney meet up of 2018! @JedWatson and @jesstelford living things off. #reactsydney https://t.co/w8j5MQtRMX
@zarahjutz Yeah! This room is AMAZING. I want to host a @SydTechLeaders here. 😂
A warning from @alexandereardon that his performance optimisation tips are going to be expert-level. At its core though it’s about not doing things you don’t need to do. #reactsydney @reactsydney https://t.co/96Z0iEK5yg
. @alexandereardon advocates using connected/not connected components as terminology in Redux rather than smart/dumb. Nice. I like it. #reactsydney
@willmendesneto @Domaincomau Are you here? Didn’t you JUST get back from Sg?!
Some nice “performance musings” to end @alexandereardon’s #reactsydney talk. This strikes me as relevant outside just technology: “Finding significant gains often involves significant change.” @reactsydney https://t.co/ZCz3WwmGhJ
Charming intro from @ajainvivek, who works at Yahoo. “It does still exist, in case you didn’t know!” 😂 #reactsydney @reactsydney https://t.co/Cze1pyRjl0
Did not expect to get to show off my most useless but impressive skill tonight. 🤓😂 #reactsydney @reactsydney https://t.co/0RaTvAoQkq
How can we apply concepts from human memory to how you store the state of your React app? Fascinating talk from @ajainvivek. #reactsydney @reactsydney https://t.co/IMgxCbb7i1
Applause as @ajainvivek successively demoes his React Memory example! 👏 #reactsydney https://t.co/lTDPkCRR4F
Learning what’s new in React 16 from Lucas Chen, visiting from Brisbane. #reactsydney (💯 on that disclaimer…) https://t.co/YpS5bGag3U
RT @gabehabash: It’s very important, every now and again, to remember what Superman flying away without CGI looks like https://t.co/8DAupSV…
Me: “Wait, have we met?”
@thejameskyle: “TWENTY!”
😂😂😂 https://t.co/Tz6qYRpNg1
Last talk is @thejameskyle showing off a new library he wrote called “Unstated.” (I watched him pretty much wrote this talk during the previous three! 😳) #reactsydney https://t.co/ulu0l54KZY
“Because it’s a JavaScript library I had to buy a .io domain. That was a really good use of $65…” 😂 @thejameskyle #reactsydney https://t.co/KmUZFAn7oO
@Amys_Kapers @reactsydney Same!!
@simonwaight @BusesNorth My friend @notsolonecoder is doing some work that might amuse you: https://t.co/yjftxmqiok. She can tell you how bad it is compared to the rest of Sydney. 🙂
RT @yow_conf: If you haven’t got this book, you can preorder this one! https://t.co/XJPBlzngLc
RT @LukeSleeman: If anybody is interested in speaking at local meetup’s or conferences and hasn’t spoken before, I would be happy to mentor…
I have a fridge magnet of this. Love Margaret Preston’s work! https://t.co/iLFvCEAhiU
Last chance, Aussies! Put those @gdcfpday skills to good use. 🙂 https://t.co/dZ0tKXvsAB
Mental fanfic happening where Lloyd Dobler is supporting a grieving Diane Court as she flies home to attend her father’s funeral. 😭 (Hollywood: I would go see this movie.) https://t.co/Gn8fbkNGhg
@jeamland This is why I paid for Acorn instead of using MacGIMP.
@Mandy_Kerr I’m now practicing that move. It’s harder than it looks. She’s my hero.
RT @Nibellion: What the fuck have you done Nintendo https://t.co/iwkBIDeZFb
-
Shared today on Twitter
Really cool talk from @yow_conf 2017: @thoughtsymmetry used machine learning to categorise places as beautiful. Interesting implications for public health and government policy! https://t.co/CsHlOH9l2d
Cyril Woodcock is my QUEEN! (But that movie was 😳.)
This cracked me up at @generalassembly yesterday. 😂 https://t.co/gQwo4aaWwV https://t.co/GQRZn0C3Gf
RT @minxdragon: Aww thankyou @KathyReid for this lovely writeup! <3 https://t.co/msYznr7LuG
Weekly Meetup Wrap – February 4, 2018. #sypy, The Big #securitydebate, and @gdcfpday ! https://t.co/z3Yt14iVej https://t.co/lQf8Vd10RV
Some excellent advice here from @Mandy_Kerr. A lot of founders expect their employees to evince ridiculous loyalty. (I heard one recently complain his employees weren’t “bleeding [company name] blue.”) This is crap. If you’re an employee, your life is more important. https://t.co/C0Nl5N2ysv
@willmendesneto @gdcfpday @ButenkoMe She’s rather hard to miss. 😂
Ask MeFi: Am I over the hill or just over it? https://t.co/p3ndMr7sKC – This sounds like a lot of discussions I’ve had with folks in the tech industry over the past year. Burnout, fatigue, and fear. 🙁
RT @FourRedShoes: This is also an unspoken down side of ‘following your bliss’ and ‘doing what you love’ – you never really leave work beca…
RT @yow_conf: Now that you have attended Global Diversity CFP day @gdcfpday, don’t forget to take your ideas and work on submissions for ou…
-
Weekly Meetup Wrap – February 4, 2018
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.
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!
