StarCon Canada 2019
Highlights from StarCon Canada 2019
January 19th and 20th I attended StarCon Canada.
StarCon is a two-day software engineering conference held in Waterloo, Ontario with two days of lightning talks about technology, computer science, programming, and the joy of learning about them!
As a frontend developer and community organizer the idea of a local software engineering conference appealed to me. StarCon was modelled after !!Con — a conference based out of NYC known for its inclusivity and diverse speakers.
The talks varied in skill level, technology, and content. Many of the participants were first time speakers. What really came through is the passion each person had for their subject, which carried on to the networking and lunch sessions.
The talks will be available online at a later date. While we wait, here is a short recap of few of my favourite talks from the conference.
Learning How to Learn
Vaidehi Joshi ( Twitter: vaidehijoshi)
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist known as “the great explainer”. Bill Gates was inspired by Feynman’s lectures which are now all publicly available through CalTech’s website.
How did Richard Feynman teach himself, so that he could teach others?
All you need to start is a fresh, empty notebook.
There are four steps to “the Feynman Technique”
- Identify what you want to learn. Write down what you already know about a subject.
- Explain the concept in simple terms to someone who knows nothing about it. This forces plain and simple terms.
- Identify any gaps. If you cannot explain something in simple terms, that’s a good indicator of a knowledge gap. This is where the learning happens.
- Organize your knowledge and create a narrative around it.
Vaidehi put these principles into practice when learning computer science. She chose one computer science topic and blogged about it once per week for a year. You can read the BaseCS series on Medium and follow that journey.
Search Engines: How They Work and Why You Need Them
Toria Gibbs (Twitter: scarletdrive)
Not every search engine is a “web search engine” like Google.
Many apps have custom text search implemented for control of data and customization.
An inverted index is a mapping of words to a set of IDs.
To create an inverted index of a raw page of text you would…
- Tokenize. Split all of the words. This is easy using English because you can split on whitespace, but much harder in other languages.
- Normalize. Keep only the stem of the word (i.e. walking would become walk). Remove all the stop words (i.e. the, at, to).
- Filter. Change synonyms to a common word (i.e. cat and kitten). Make all the letters lowercase.
Now you have an inverted index that is searchable. You have to remember when you go to search to apply all the same transformations to any text you search with, in the same order.
Inverted indexes allow for fast searching times. The trade-off is the storage space, code complexity, and pre-processing time you need to build a proper index.
Hype Yourself!
Aashni Shah (Twitter: Aashnisshah)
We are all our best hype person, but proving your value can be difficult.
The Hype Doc system is a simple way to track your accomplishments in a living document. Setting one up will come in handy for personal goal tracking, performance reviews, letters of recommendation, and self-evaluation.
Hype docs can be personalized to you! A simple example using Google Sheets would have columns for Date, Activity, Type, Impacts, and Notes.
Things to include in your hype doc:
- Projects you’ve shipped
- Cross-team collaboration
- Invisible accomplishments
- Extra-curricular activities
A great way to stay on track with your hype doc is to have a scheduled update meeting (possibly with others!) in your calendar.
You can read Aashni’s full explanation of Hype Docs on Medium.
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