JeffConf London: Short-Notice Serverless Conference
Taking my Alexa demo to a Jeff conference
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at JeffConf in London. It was the first edition of a Serverless Conference, brought together by enthusiasts and generous sponsors at relatively short notice.
Serverless is a hot topic, and the conference filled a needed space in the technology event landscape. The organisers had also gone out of their way to reach developers from all sorts of backgrounds, and provided a variety of content including lightning talks and panel discussions.
There was definitely something for everyone in this single-track event. Here are the talks that stood out to me:
- Architectural advice and proclamations of doom from the one and only Simon Wardley
- A great presentation from Ben Fletcher of the Financial Times about their implementation of serverless technology
- A technical session from Guy Podjarny on security considerations of code that “costs nothing”, that we’re likely to deploy and forget
The hallway tracks, catering and after-party were great, and I had many interesting and (mostly!) technical conversations with a wide range of people. This included meeting some of my colleagues (IBM is a big company) that I haven’t actually met in person yet, which is always excellent.
I can also bring you video of my own talk, where I attempt to co-present with an Amazon Alexa. She’s wired into the sound system, and I’ve got the mic so everyone can hear us. The only problem is … she can’t hear me well with the reverberations in the presentation hall! Never work with children, animals, or partially-sentient gadgets, that’s my advice.
For more on my alexa-project-codename code, see my recent article, Add Redis to Your Serverless Application. And here are the slides from my JeffConf talk. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and thanks for reading!
