Impressions from !!Con
Back in May I had the awesome luck to be able to attend !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”). It was fantastic, so naturally I wanted to share my notes.
!!con is a two-day conference in New York City run mainly by Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School) alumni. It’s about programming in general; the only requirement was that your talk proposal had to have at least one exclamation point. All talks are 10 minutes long.
Attendees were mostly professional software engineers, but there was a huge diversity of fields and interests. Some people traveled, but a lot were based in NYC.
I was speaking about musical programming + Arduino, so I showed off some of my YouTube videos of my musical instruments.
Recordings & Transcripts
Recordings coming eventually? http://bangbangcon.com/recordings.html
Transcripts here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15QaEghNd1-MH8RqZhf54tsuXA9aaMTS0WbS9GL_2EIE/edit?usp=sharing
General Impressions
!!con attendees were all very cool, and very passionate about coding (and all their other hobbies too — generally, just excited and excitable people). The event sold out very quickly, so we were all lucky to be there.
The conference really hit it out of the park with accessibility: nut-free, dairy-free, vegan-friendly food; live captioning by a stenographer; all-gender restrooms; adoption of the Recurse Center social rules; etc. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a friendlier tech-centric space, and that meant that we could be excited about learning things together.
Tickets were offered by lottery, which meant there was a huge range of people in attendance. I think this made it more interesting!
Highlights from Talks
The quality of talks was generally really high, so picking my favorites was really difficult.
Git from the Inside Out, by Mary Rose Cook
- Mary basically drilled down and walked us through how git actually works under the hood, by diving into the files stored in the .git directory. It was very well done.
- As someone who likes teaching this kind of stuff, it was really impressive & inspiring. It definitely gave me some ideas to use the next time I need to explain git to someone!
- Blog post: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the-inside-out
Programming industrial-sized knitting machines with Javascript, by Lea Albaugh
- http://bangbangcon.com/speakers.html#lea-albaugh
- Turns out programmable knitting machines are A Thing
- Normally you “program” them with horrible pixel art
- Javascript is cooler than terrible pixel art, but also some weird geometry problems
Reverse debugging with rr, by Josh Mathews
- http://bangbangcon.com/speakers.html#josh-matthews
- http://rr-project.org/
- rr seems super cool — it’s a debugger that lets you “record” stuff and then step backwards through time, allowing you to do things like figure out why your flaky test is flaky. Time travel!
I made a cell phone! by Kevin Lynagh
- http://bangbangcon.com/speakers.html#kevin-lynagh
- No literally this guy built a cell phone from scratch. (I mean, he didn’t invent the universe, so not really from scratch.) But he sourced his own parts, did the programming, built the casing, etc, etc.
- Did you know that frying-pan soldering is A Thing?
!!con was awesome, I would totally attend again, and if you get the chance, you should go.
Seriously, hats off to the organizers and to the community!
