Build your own IoTshirt

Ever wanted your clothing to respond to the music you're listening to? With a bit of JS and soldering, they can!
This talk will cover how to make your own wearable LED display using a microcontroller and hook it up to the internet. Then we'll learn how to do music recognition with an API, node and some vanilla JS.
I'll help you to avoid some of the silly mistakes I made while working on my first wearable and encourage you to give IoT a try!

Wearable Live Captions (making mask wearing more accessible for those who are hard of hearing)

During the pandemic we've all been feeling pretty isolated, and we've all been doing our best and wearing masks. But what if everyone wearing masks cuts off your ability to converse?

My dear mum relies on lip reading and clear sounds to understand what people are saying. But I, of course want her to stay safe. So the thought occurred. Can I make a live captioning display fit into a mask so that she can read what I'm saying as I'm speaking?

This talk will cover how to build a wearable LED display, how to use Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to convert speech to text, using Ably's MQTT broker to send messages to a microprocessor and some good old JavaScript and C++.

Live captioning of speech to text has so many useful applications and Cognitive Services makes it fast and easy to build captioning into your applications. Together with Ably Realtime, it is possible to make wearable devices which can display what you’re saying, in real time. Wearable Live Captions!

I'll bring the mask to the talk and it will be livecaptioning what I say as the talk goes on.

Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome, Anxiety and Learning to be Kind to Yourself

Ever felt like everyone knows more than you? Spent hours procrastinating rather than starting or finishing a project?

Perfectionism, anxiety & impostor syndrome affect many people in the tech industry. Learn how to spot harmful thought patterns, how to avoid anxious spirals and be kind to yourself!

Working in the tech industry can sometimes make us feel inferior. It is easy to start believing that everyone knows more, or finds the work easier. When we’re surrounded by so many clever people, how can we not start to judge ourselves against them and our work against theirs?

Impostor syndrome - the belief that you don’t deserve to be where you are, and perfectionism - a need to work to impossibly high standards, are exhausting.

Learn how to spot these destructive thought patterns in yourself, how to manage anxiety and procrastination and how to start being kinder to yourself, because you’re awesome and you deserve to be here.

I’ve suffered from all of the above-mentioned syndromes for the majority of my tech career and I mentor many individuals who suffer similarly. Through therapy and research, I have learnt to recognize black and white thinking and depression spirals and I think it is important to share this knowledge wider and start us talking more regularly about mental wellbeing in tech.

Build your own IoTshirt

If you, like me, have been playing lots of multiplayer games while social distancing, you may have felt some frustration at game complexity, or install time or any of a number of hurdles that stop your friends from joining in. Surely we as web developers can do better than this?! Let’s build a game!

This talk will go over how to build a fun multiplayer game which runs in the browser. The game will use Vue.js, real-time messaging, peer to peer architecture and some simple state management, and we’ll cover how and why I chose these technologies. By talk end you’ll have all the knowledge you need to build a fun game for your friends and family.

Build a multiplayer game with Vue and pub/sub messaging

If you, like me, have been playing lots of multiplayer games while social distancing, you may have felt some frustration at game complexity, or install time or any of a number of hurdles that stop your friends from joining in. Surely we as web developers can do better than this?! Let’s build a game!

It’s 2021 and we’re still mid pandemic, which means we’re social distancing and missing our friends. Many of us have been playing multiplayer games in place of hanging out with our friends. But have you considered building your own games?

This talk will go over how to build a fun multiplayer game which runs in the browser. The game will use Vue.js, real-time messaging, peer to peer architecture and some simple state management, and we’ll cover how and why I chose these technologies. By talk end you’ll have all the knowledge you need to build a fun game for your friends and family.

Making a wearable live caption display using Azure Cognitive Services and Ably Realtime

Live captioning of speech to text has so many useful applications and Cognitive Services makes it fast and easy to build captioning into your applications. Together with Ably Realtime, it is possible to make wearable devices which can display what you’re saying, in real time. Wearable live captions!

Inspired by the frustration that my mother, who is hard of hearing, feels at being unable to lip read people who are wearing masks, combined with the muffled sound a mask creates, I built a wearable live caption display into a mask. It shows the text of what I’m saying, in real-time so that she can continue a conversation with me easily, while maintaining eye contact.

The talk will go over how to program an LED display, how to use Azure Cognitive Services to transform speech into text and how to send data in real time from ACS to the display using MQTT.

Is everything difficult, or is it just me?

It isn't just you.

There are so many pressures on us, not only from our jobs and the tech industry, but from the state of society, politics and the economy as a whole.

Join me on a joyful journey through the alphabet of overwhelm, we’ll cover Anxiety, Burnout, Capitalism, Depression, Emotional Labour and many other fun factors. We’ll talk through how to recognise symptoms in yourself and your friends. Lets learn how to survive, and hopefully thrive, in this ABSea of sh*t.

Let’s make 2023 the year that we put as much thought into protecting our mental health as we do our code quality.

A love letter to long lines and other DX stories

Writing code is fun! Reading it, not so much.

As developers we spend as much, if not more time reading code than we do writing it. However we often forget when coding that we're writing for other humans to read as much as we are for computers to execute.

This talk goes over how to create a better developer experience in your projects by writing code with intent. Leading the reader through your codebase should feel like settling in to watch your favourite TV show; enjoyable and unsurprising.

With this, and other DX skills covered in the talk, we will create maintainable, educational and pleasant to use projects, not only for other developers, but also for our future selves!