The day before yesterday I was honoured to open the Berlin Edition of Codemotion
. Codemotion touts itself the biggest developer event in Europe and is a multi-track event in Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid, Milan and many other European locations. I spoke there before in Rome, but I have to say the event grew much bigger and they do a great job with the marketing around the event.
My opening keynote covered the topic of ethics in AI and democratizing Machine Learning. I made sure to end on a positive note and invite anyone to start playing with and owning these technologies instead of just becoming consumers or victims of it.
My second task was a more technical JavaScript talk about getting to grips with the changed world of JavaScript without feeling overwhelmed. Again, all the resources, slides and tweet reactions of the JavaScript talk are on notist.
I’d love to say more about the event, but with me being interviewed in between and generally having a bad cold, I didn’t watch too many other talks and stayed in the shadows.
I just came back from Reasons.to conference where I gave the opening keynote about the perils of social media and how we should use the privileges we have to make them better. I will do a longer write-up about this later, but a lot of people asked for the slides and links to the resources I covered, so here you go.
A couple of Dutch journalist managed to track down”:https://bit.ly/fit-tracked the identities and location of spies, government officials and military personel using a fitness tracker
I just got back from Beyond Tellerrand in Munich and here’s a quick report what you missed if you didn’t go. You might not be interested in my impressions, so let’s get my work out of the way first.
I gave the opening keynote “Sacrificing the golden calf of coding” in which I explained my transition from a hobby coder to a professional developer and learning along the way that tooling and automation is not the enemy.
The video is already available on the Vimeo Channel:
As you may know, I am a huge fan of Beyond Tellerrand. The organizer is a very old friend of mine and he bends over backwards to make the event something special. He cherry-picks the speakers, treats them immensely well and on a deeply personal level. I feel very proud to be a part of this for many years. On a personal level, I am chuffed about its success as my partner and me met at this event. Thus, she also was a volunteer this time and helped making this event work smoothly for all the attendees.
I was worried that branching out from Duesseldorf to Berlin and Munich might be a tough step for the event and as Munich is not a hotspot for events I worried about participation numbers. But I shouldn’t have. The even was full up and people stayed for the whole duration. I was heartbroken to hear about a massive personal loss in the organiser’s life just before the event and I am even more so impressed how well it worked out.
I shot quite a few photos at the event, none of which of course will match what the official photographers managed to get.
Beyond Tellerrand is ridiculously fast in releasing the videos of the event as they are mixed live. I love this as with booth duties at the Microsoft stand and personal errands I couldn’t see all the talks but will do so now in the nearer future. Here are some picks that may tickle your fancy, too:
Simon Collison’s “The Internet of Natural Things” talk was a lovely reminder how the internet is not all about cold technical things but also a way to organise your life and record natural things around you. It ends with an intriguing new way how an OS could look to be more helpful for people in their natural environment.
Harry Robert’s “Why Fast Matters” is a talk full of great information on how to measure and improve the speed of your products and what the positive effects of that can be. Harry does not only show tools but also proves why considering improvements can make profound business sense. And he explains how well performing products are truly international and help you reach new markets without breaking the bank of users who live there. His slides with all the links are available on speakerdeck.
Nadieh Bremer’s “Data Sketches: A Year of Exotic Data Visualisations” is a whirlwind explanation of her last year of creating bafflingly beautiful data visualisations. She doesn’t only show off her work and talks about the beauty of it but explains the story warts and all – from having to scrape and clean up the data to iteratively doing the math on paper to get the effects she wanted to have.
Dina Amin’s “A tinker story” was a total surprise to me and clearly the winner of the event. It already inspired me to write two new talks. Dina is a lady from Egypt who likes to take mechanical things apart and build stop motion animations from them. That’s impressive enough, but the real beauty of the talk is about her story. How she dared to do something that crazy and creative instead of pursuing a normal career and how the internet and working with other people over it made that possible. If you want to see some really cool animations and hear a story of empowerment and joy, this is for you.
Make sure to keep checking the channel for more videos coming up. Another absolute highlight was Stefan Sagmeister’s closing keynote which was a gorgeous and sweary rant about how we should embrace beauty instead of following outdated Bauhaus ideas. And it ended with the whole audience singing along with him to a song about beauty.
There is no question in my book that Beyond Tellerrand is a worth-while conference to support and attend. My company agreed to support all the events this year and I am looking forward to seeing the next one in May in Duesseldorf. You should, too.
Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to give the opening keynote at the excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. I wrote a talk for the occasion that covered a strange disconnect that we’re experiencing at the moment.
Whilst web technology advanced leaps and bounds we still seem to be discontent all the time. I called this the Tetris mind set: all our mistakes are perceived as piling up whilst our accomplishments vanish.
I will follow this up with a more in-depth article on the subject in due course, but for today I am very happy how well received the keynote was and I want to remind people that it is OK to build things that don’t last and that you don’t owe the world perfection. Creativity is a messy process and we should feel at ease about learning from mistakes.
Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to give the opening keynote at the excellent Beyond Tellerand conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. I wrote a talk for the occasion that covered a strange disconnect that we’re experiencing at the moment.
Whilst web technology advanced leaps and bounds we still seem to be discontent all the time. I called this the Tetris mind set: all our mistakes are perceived as piling up whilst our accomplishments vanish.
I will follow this up with a more in-depth article on the subject in due course, but for today I am very happy how well received the keynote was and I want to remind people that it is OK to build things that don’t last and that you don’t owe the world perfection. Creativity is a messy process and we should feel at ease about learning from mistakes.
Yesterday I gave the closing keynote of the Tweakers Developer Summit in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The conference topic was “Webdevelopment – Coding the Universe” and the organisers asked me to give a talk about Machine Learning and what it means for developers in the nearer future. So I took out my crystal ball and whipped up the following talk:
GOAT raising $25M for marketplace for collectible sneakers – this was an example of how we as developers failing at influencing what our market is doing. We’re still at a stage where plain consumerism wins the big investments and technology is used to cater to the needs of a very small, very affluent group
The Power of Big Data and Psychographics – an incredibly scary presentation of Cambridge Analytica at Concordia summit showing how applying the OCEAN psychology test to Facebook quizzes allowed them to influence voters in the Brexit and Trump votes
AIPoly – an app to detect objects and tell blind users what they are using a Neural Network on the device instead of having to be online and suffering the latency that comes with that. Demo video here
Open images dataset is Google’s alternative to ImageNet, a lot of metadata for image URLs described with humain aid
CaptionBot is a demo by microsoft using Cognitive Services to describe images.
Microsoft Cognitive Services is a suite of APIs using Machine Learning to understand images, sounds, text and enhance your projects to have a more human output and allow for human input
Custom Recognition Service is a service by Microsoft to filter content by giving it context, thus improving the outcome of OCR or speech to text conversions
Video Breakdown is a service to detect speakers, sentiments and create a transcript of videos
My visit to the medical holodeck is my report about visiting Weill Cornell hospital in New York where they use VR for visualisation of diseases and HoloLens to design medication
Sophia Roshal’s HoloLens demo shows the intern’s project at Weill Cornell using HoloLens to visualise cancer medication and tumor data
Anamaria Cotîrlea is a Google employee whose research as an intern saves the company 1.5 petabytes of data each day by switching the Android store from gzip to brotli compression.
The next blue collar job is coding explains how a lot of soon-out-of-job workers re-educate themselves working in IT as it is the only really growing market
Yes, this was a lot – maybe too much – for one talk, but the feedback I got was all very positive, so I am hoping for the video to come out soon.
Last week I was lucky enough to give the closing keynote at the Awwwards Conference in New York.
Following my current fascination, I wanted to cover the topic of Progressive Web Apps for an audience that is not too technical, and also very focused on delivering high-fidelity, exciting and bleeding edge experiences on the web.
Getting slightly too excited about my Star Wars based title, I got a bit overboard with bastardising Star Wars quotes in the slides, but I managed to cover a lot of the why of progressive web apps and how it is a great opportunity right now.
I covered:
The web as an idea and its inception: independent, distributed and based on open protocols
The power of links
The horrible environment that was the first browser wars
The rise of standards as a means to build predictable, future-proof products
How we became too dogmatic about standards
How this lead to rebelling developer using JavaScript to build everything
Why this is a brittle environment and a massive bet on things working flawlessly on our users’ computers
How we never experience this as our environments are high-end and we’re well connected
How we defined best practices for JavaScript, like Unobtrusive JavaScript and defensive coding
How libraries and frameworks promise to fix all our issues and we’ve become dependent on them
How a whole new generation of developers learned development by copying and pasting library-dependent code on Stackoverflow
How this, among other factors, lead to a terribly bloated web full of multi-megabyte web sites littered with third party JavaScript and library code
How to rise of mobile and its limitations is very much a terrible environment for those to run in
How native apps were heralded as the solution to that
How we retaliated by constantly repeating that the web will win out in the end
How we failed to retaliate by building web-standard based apps that played by the rules of native – an environment where the deck was stacked against browsers
How right now our predictions partly came true – the native environments and closed marketplaces are failing to deliver right now. Users on mobile use 5 apps and download on average not a single new one per month
How users are sick of having to jump through hoops to try out some new app and having to lock themselves in a certain environment
How the current state of supporting mobile hardware access in browsers is a great opportunity to build immersive experiences with web technology
How ServiceWorker is a great opportunity to offer offline capable solutions and have notifications to re-engage users and allow solutions to hibernate
How Progressive Web Apps are a massive opportunity to show native how software distribution should happen in 2016
Die letzten drei Tage war ich in Darmstadt auf der BASTA Konferenz, um mich mit Leuten über den Tod von IE, dem Selbstverständnis eines immergrünen Browsers in Windows, des Open Source releases von Chakra und Machine Learning mit Project Oxford zu unterhalten. Neben eines Interviews mit Entwickler TV und kiloweise tollem Essens habe ich dann auch die Keynote gehalten.
In den etwa 20 minuten habe ich die Basta Seite auseinandergenommen und einige Mythen der Webentwicklung zerlegt. Ausserdem gehts um Rolltreppen und japanische Toiletten.
I am currently on a trip in Singapore, Thailand and Sydney for the next 8 days and today I presented at JSConf Asia and a meetup in the Microsoft offices in Singapore.
JSConf Asia closing keynote
The closing keynote of the first day of JSConf Asia covered my worries that we are getting slightly overboard in our affection of JavaScript to solve every issue. It seems we have forgotten just how versatile a language it is and that how we use it depends very much on the environment we run it in. The slides are on SlideShare.
As the audience at the meetup was more mixed, and I was deadly tired, I thought it is a good plan to create a presentation that covers how we can learn JavaScript these days. It explains the use cases of it, resources how to easily run a node and express server and talks about Visual Studio Code and how to clean up old and outdated code. The learning JS meetup slides are also on Slideshare.
I am right now on the plane back to England after my quick stint at Vienna giving the keynote at jQuery Europe 2014. True to my ongoing task to challenge myself as a speaker (and as announced here before) I made a bit of a bet by giving a talk that is not in itself technical, but analytical of what we do as developers. The talk was filmed and if you can’t wait, I made the slides available and recorded a screencast (with low sound, sorry).
In the keynote, I tried to analyse the massive discrepancy between what we as web developers get and how happy we seem to be.
We are an elite group in the job market: we are paid well, our work environment is high-tech and our perks make other people jealous. We even get the proverbial free lunches.
And yet our image is that of unsatisfied, hard to work with people who need to be kept happy and are socially awkward. I was confused that a group with all the necessary creature comforts is not an example of how easy working together could be. Instead, we even seem to need codes of conduct for our events to remind people not to behave badly towards people of the other sex or cultural background. Are we spoiled? Are we just broken? Or is there more?
I’ve found a few reasons why we can come across as unsatisfied and hard to handle and the biggest to me was that whilst we are getting pampered, we lack real recognition for what we do.
When you get a lot, but you yourself feel you are not really doing much, you are stuck between feeling superior to others who struggle with things you consider easy and feeling like a fraud. Instead of trying to communicate out about what we do, how much work it involves and why we do things in a certain way we seem to flee into a world of blaming our tools and trying to impress one another.
Initial Feedback
I am very happy to report that the feedback I got at the event was very good. I had some criticism, which is great as it gives me something to think about. And I had some heartfelt remarks from people who said I’ve opened their eyes a bit as to why they behaved in a certain way and now know how to fix some issues and clashes they had.
Want more?
I don’t want to repeat it all here again – if wanted, I could write a larger article on the subject to be published somewhere with more eyeballs. Simply listen to the recording or wait for the video to be released.
Material
I couldn’t have done this without watching some other talks and reading some other posts, so here are links to the materials used:
I want to thank the audience of jQuery Europe for listening and being open to something different. I also want to thank the organisers for taking the chance (and setting the speakers up in the most epic hotel I ever stayed in). I also want to point out that another talk at jQuery Europe 2014 – “A Web Beyond Touch” by Petro Salema was one of the most amazing first stage performances by a speaker I have seen. So keep your eyes open for this video.
Thank you @marcthiele for this opportunity, for getting amazing speakers all under one roof and for being the good person you are. Thanks to all the amazing people whom I've met who made this a fun happy experience for me, hopefully we all meet again! You now all have a friend in Egypt 
#btconf Oo and I made my very first 
and whipped up the following talk:
