List of videos

Knitting patterns are effectively code that gives you a physical object if you execute them. Customizing and designing patterns takes a lot of math to get sizing and shapes right, but not all knitters love math, and even those who do don't want to do it by hand all the time. Every year at PyCon I meet a few more knitters, so I thought maybe this was the year we could put our heads together and build an open source knitting toolkit and maybe make customizing your knitting a little easier for everyone. The pyKnit toolkit will hopefully make it easier for people to adjust garment patterns to fit, for pattern designers to be size inclusive, or for any knitter to adjust patterns to make the most out of a special ball of yarn. Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Kr7Nmzgs5RCqx3kxyMDXwGNGe9Skq8E4bquLQhI3fdo/edit?usp=sharing

We have built a system that uses javascript to manipulate the physical RAM of an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) while it is running, to arbitrarily read or write system memory. This enables new cheat codes, wacky ways to play games, investigations into how games work, and the ability to create external visuals from a game's data, such as collision detection or advanced HUDs (heads-up displays). Using a video mixer, we can even combine views to make augmented games. Our system has an easy to use interface, allowing the creation of javascript code to control game memory, and these scripts can be used without modification in an NES emulator that has had nodejs embedded into it.

I'm going to walk you through the wilds of data handling in react. I say “the wilds” because when you first look at the landscape, it seems to be overflowing with an untamed profusion of different options. It's hard to figure out why you might want to use any one in particular. When you look closer, you'll see that it's actually easier to navigate than you might think. You just need a good guide.

This is a 5 part story about (my side project and attempted full time project in 2014) "JS Bin" and the abuse that it's suffered over the last 7 years of being an open project. The stories include tales of spam, abuse from registered users and the impact on personal life, dealing with the process of taking money, and the pain (oh...the pain) and finally police involvement (from a casual planned DDoS, child pornography and terrorism). In each section, I've tried to end on a positive note (but it's not terribly technical) even though the actual content is fairly negative and dark at times. It's an extremely personal story, but there's way too much "hey, my project is awesome, who want's a high-five?!" - this is very much the antidote!

Ever lose out on a good night's rest because your pesky cats keep waking you up at 4am for food? Rachel has. Many times. For her first project using node, socket.io, microcontrollers, and johnny-five, Rachel built a web-based feeder that delivers tasty cat chow on a configurable schedule or when triggered remotely. She'll walk you through her learning process with utilizing new tech for the first time and get you excited about trying your own projects so you can take the first steps to putting your work out and contributing to the open source community.

Conquering fears of inadequacy while enabling people to write dope poetry with each other. Basically, the struggles of working on a project alone, how to combine your interests to make something interesting for you to work on, and how to execute and spread the word.

In this talk, Glen Goodwin and Todd Gandee will walk back from the present day to the “ancient” past of Babbage and Lovelace discussing how the act of “creative borrowing” influences learning and understanding for computer programmers; how we learn by observing and deconstructing the work of others to make it our own. This includes an examination of past and current models used for “stealing” the (mostly) freely shared knowledge and past work of others like Github, StackOverflow, View Source, and Byte Magazine. Our talk emphasises the importance of inclusive conferences like JSConf in the growth of junior and senior software engineers. Programmers’ tools of today illustrate the apprentice/mentor relationship more akin to the arts than engineering.

On 23rd July 2014, the first case of Ebola was reported in Nigeria, home to a small NGO working at the intersection of tech and public health. By then over 1000 cases had been reported in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. This is a story of how we use JavaScript to fight the Ebola outbreak. It’s also a story of building good tech for hard places, where a stable internet connection is rare and emergencies are real. There are a lot of awesome technologies (e.g. CouchDB and PouchDB) out there to help you build offline applications. There is also no shortage of beginner level online tutorials to show you how to do a quick and nice first prototype, but as in any new field there is not so much documentation available to help you solve the problems you’ll find when deploying your offline applications to be used in the “real” world. This talk will present some of these problems as well as the solutions we came up with, including some open source tools developed by ourselves.

I don't want to just reprise the "BACON" talk - I'd like to talk about everything I've learned in the past 5 years (which is a lot) and includes insights on running and growing a team, starting a family, going deep into passions and more.