The Top 10 Tech Talks in 2018

One of the things that makes us so proud to contribute to the greater developer community is our ability to showcase some of the best minds in tech through free online videos of their talks (SkillsCasts). Whether these be at our various conferences or meetups, some truly incredible tech talks come our way and we feel it only fair that we share these.

2018 was another fascinating year of talks, ranging from learning how to program the world’s first quantum computers using Forest to architecting a web application in a functional style, but there were 10 tech talks this year that attracted the most attention from our community:

10. Conveying the Power of Abstraction — Dr Eugenia Cheng

Concert pianist and mathematician, Dr Eugenia Cheng delivered a keynote at Scala eXchange London this year, looking at our relationship with abstraction and its potential for dramatically improving how we think if it is incorporated in different ways within education systems.

9. Building a Flutter App in an Hour (or Less) — Matt Sullivan

Leader of developer relations for Flutter from Google’s Mountain View campus, Matt Sullivan spoke in March at London’s CodeNode on the underlying principles of programming with Flutter, which integrates with iOS and Android and works with existing code.

8. Nuke It From Orbit: How to Deal With Massive View Controllers Once and For All — Paul Hudson

Prolific author and lover of all things Swift, Paul Hudson never fails to give an entertaining tech talk. In March he talked about Model View Controller patterns and reducing coupling and maintenance in code.

7. An Introduction to Event Sourcing — Alfredo Motta

Software engineer and CTO at CreditSpring, Alfredo Motta spoke in May on ‘event sourcing’ — “a recently developed design pattern to build applications that are domain centric and easy to extend”.

6. ARKit 1.5 image recognition: Make movie posters come to life — Romain Derrien

Founder of Ubicolor and organiser of the iOS London Meetup, Romain Derrien spoke in March about using ARKit 1.5 to bring movie posters to life through AR.

5. Scrum Event & Dave Snowden present — Pre-Scrum techniques and the state of Agile — Dave Snowden

Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge (among other things), Dave Snowden always gives fascinating talks and his talk in January early this year was no exception. He looked back at what made Agile so attractive, where it has gotten lost and where it is headed in the future.

4. F# Code I Love — Don Syme

At F# eXchange 2018 Don Syme (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Mobile Tools and Microsoft Research, Cambridge) delivered a keynote on the type of F# code he loves and how to find the sweet spot when using F# as an individual and in teams.

3. SAFE apps with F# web stack — Tomasz Heimowski

A developer with a passion for F# and Functional Programming, Tomasz Heimowski also spoke at F# eXchange on the benefits of the SAFE stack when using F#.

2. Flutter with Streams and RxDart — Brian Egan

Front-end developer Brian Egan spoke in July on how to structure Flutter apps and how to architect apps using Dart Streams. This was the second most popular tech talk we released this year, and for good reason, as increasing numbers of developers look towards Flutter to expand their skillset.

1. What is AI and How will it speed up my ML workload? — Chris Parsons

The most popular talk this year! Chris Parsons (Machine Learning Engineer with IBM Systems Lab Service) spoke in detail early this year on the PowerAI platform and how it could be used for Deep Learning and Machine Learning projects. The surging interest in DL and ML within tech makes it clear why this talk keeps grabbing the attention of developers.

👍 For news and articles from Skills Matter, subscribe to our newsletter here.