Month: February 2018
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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
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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…
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Shared today on Facebook
This cracked me up at @generalassembly yesterday. 😂
Weekly Meetup Wrap – February 4, 2018. Three events this week: SyPy, The Big Security Debate, and Global Diversity CFP Day!
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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!
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Shared today on Twitter
@philiplaureano 😱 That’s awful!
Ideation circle discussion happening! @gdcfpday https://t.co/6gNKZ8A54l
The folks with talk ideas are sharing for feedback before diving in to abstract writing! @gdcfpday https://t.co/IZLixSJbbx
Some folks who signed up at the last minute are working through ideation exercises with @IngaPflaumer! @gdcfpday https://t.co/XDcPVuISPF
Just heard a first conf talk idea from a newbie that is so brilliant I’m jealous I didn’t think of it first! 🤗 @gdcfpday
Mentor @ButenkoMe is on brand today – there’s a @NodeGirlsSydney coming up! @gdcfpday https://t.co/E04N0i94ty
SNACK TIME! Thank you @marlousteh and @yow_conf for keeping our carb levels up. 😂 @gdcfpday https://t.co/6KdSKZSuzS
Time to learn about crafting our bios from Danielle at @womentalkdesign! @gdcfpday https://t.co/d5IJ0j6liq
Shhhhhh! No one tell @the_snook. (I have a slight Pretzel Addiction.) https://t.co/33ilAjp008
RT @mobywhale: Writing your own bio is hard. Try asking someone else what you should be putting down! @gdcfpday
Feedback from a Sydney @gdcfpday attendee: “Something I learned – that everyone has a talk or ten in them!” ☺️❤️👏 https://t.co/uY3pKkOMeN
Now this is just ridiculous. Spotted from an upstairs window… https://t.co/MyEyjP5uXt
Nah, I just brought a bunch of talented folks together. Amazing mentors, facilitators, and sponsors. ❤️ Special thanks to @SydneyGA for hosting @gdcfpday! https://t.co/QrkTLAXOKj
RT @campjs: 📢 The CampJS IX CFP is now open 🎉
10th-13th Aug in the Gold Coast Hinterlands
https://t.co/23dEGLiTKKHope to see some of the…
RT @MichelePlayfair: Fantastic way to kick off the weekend with #gdcfpday Melbourne – interesting and passionate bunch of people, there’s g…
@MichelePlayfair Please send them towards @yow_conf’s CFPs! Would love submissions from new folks for YOW Data and Lambda Jam. 😉
@dp_lewis Ugh. I tried on FB marketplace recently. It’s just Gumtree all over again.
RT @JessicaYMao: the most important techo entry I’ve ever made https://t.co/rJ4Hp2Ffjm
RT @gdcfpday: Looks like everyone in Sydney had a great workshop!
Thank you @web_goddess and team @ReenaRajani @developerjack @lizlingc @B…
RT @gdcfpday: Big thank you to our Sydney workshop sponsors @SydneyGA and @yow_conf!
This workshop wouldn’t have been able to happen witho…
@KieranSatour @gdcfpday @indigitek Happy to run another session for @indigitek if you like!
@daamon_parker Consider how annoying it is for a person to always receive the same personal remark every single time they get in a cab. Read the replies from other Aussies who were questioned about their visa status. It’s not always an innocent question. 🙄
