Why do I go to conferences? I am looking for the expanding of the mind. I want to hear about things I’ve never thought about before. After attending Madison+ Ruby… I really wish some of my (past, present, and future) coworkers were here.

Note: titles here represent what I remember the talk by, not any attempt at the real titles.

Ratings represent how much effort I personally would advise my past self to devote to travelling to the talk, given my post-talk total knowledge.

Talks

What is life? @nusco *bike

generated petri dish / evolution simulation (from genome!)
“it crashed the screen. it was not supposed to be that smart.”
simulation includes energy - the sim dies if there is too little. Hunts for ‘food’ scattered on the petri dish.
dnabrowser .germfile
“They [the generated organisms] take advantage of my bugs- in the physics engine. They exploit it.” (Wasn’t taking into account moments of inertia.)
“This is the same process that created mold and penguins and trees and people.”
“This is the story of how I got emotionally attached to stick figures.”
https://github.com/nusco/narjillos
book: metaprogramming ruby 2

The Bronx (Stephanie Morillo, writer at DigitalOcean) *bike

The vast majority of the people at this conference have ridden the NY city subway at least once.
The demographics of train cars are fascinating- the one place where people from dramatically different parts of society spend time together daily.
“The Bronx isn’t burning. The bronx is invisible to people in the tech industry.”
StartupBox is an org teaching ppl underemployed people in the Bronx how to become game industry quality analysts
“Tech is… monochromatic”
“I am a 10x english syntax engineer!”
“I start and end my commute with the people who clean the offices that I work in.”
“Show them what the commandline is. Take away the magic. Take the ninjas out of it.”
Presenter notes on the phone is cool. What app is she using? Is there a good one? I’ve seen others do this too.
Don’t shame people for learning to code and not getting work as developers. You can learn to code in order to become a better marketer or publicist! Especially at a tech firm or marketing to tech firms.
“If you maintain a gem, a library, and you have documentation- hire a technical documenter. I might not use your gem, but I will understand the heck out of it!”
Comparing diversity to getting up on the train when someone pregnant needs to sit: it doesn’t invalidate your being-on-the-train-ness.
How do you “do” diversity? Hire the people you don’t hire. “…Let’s start there.” … “Go to schools in your area that you don’t source from.” Rethink why you don’t source there.
Don’t think of it as “the wrong side of town” think of it as potential energy.

Howto fix communications in one day *step

Closed captioning youtube made an unexpectly huge business impact; the ramifications go well beyond acessibility.
“filling a damaged pipeline is very frustrating.” [The pipeline of women going into technical fields]
Skateistan
[Harvard experiment detecting biases] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
This seemed to me like a generic “diversity is good” talk
list yourself as a woman speaker
(Berlin) Ruby Monday Study Group’stas
rails girls summer of code

Estimation (table XI, Noel Rappin @noelrap) *walk

Understudy speaker!!! (This is a cool conference idea. Do all conferences do this? What do you do with the understudy/backup speakers that don’t have to perform?)
“How far do you live from an airport?” twenty minutes (by car, weather, not rush hour…)
Slides
Boston Big Dig overpass
Site
Book
Explans feature, story, iteration, point, velocity
This talk re-convinced me that points are useful, even for my current team.
“If they were precise, we would call them measurements. They are probabilistic.”
“If the weatherman says there is a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, and it doesn’t rain, was the weatherman wrong? We can’t tell. You have to measure over time.” “Weathermen overestimate rain, beeacuse if he says it’ll rain and it doesn’t, people are happy. The other way, and they’re pissed off. There may be a relation to software development here.” (crowd laughs)
Implies paypal is not easy to integrate with. Interesting. I thought that they were.
“If you have pressure to fake estimates, the culture is toxic and you should leave. If possible.”
“You want it by [next month]? Sure, I can produce an estimate that does that.” (crowd laughs)
“The map is not the terrain.” (my favorite slide of this talk)
“Avoid false precision. Just because you divide two numbers by each other and get five decimal places, that doesn’t mean that those decimal places are meaningful.” YES THIS
It is toxic to reference variable time per developer in estimation. There is a time and place for individual developer evaluation, and estimations are not it.

Lunch - There was $20 cash in each swag bag, and you went out with newly-met people and bought local food. This worked well. 90 min for an unhurried lunch. Networking encouragement, giving back to community, etc.

Ditching the single page application *step

Types of app: traditional, pjax/turbolinks, traditional.
“If you can benchmark in ‘Mississippi’s, you’ve screwed something up.”
“Javascript doesnt move your servers any closer to your users.”
book? javascript the evil parts
http://www.hackblossom.org/

Tenderfoot’s journey *step

Programming is more like language than math rails competence map https://dgosxlrnzhofi.cloudfront.net/custom_page_images/64/page_images/Rails_Competencies.png?1386276348
‘bingle’ a word probably intended in this presentation to mean “generic search engine” i.e. bing + google
“that looks pretty bad but it can feel even worse.”
On heroes
trans*code
exelerate tech
TIL Polyconf

mruby *bike

Slides
distributable ruby binaries
hk heroku cli
traveling ruby
mruby-cli A utility for setting up a CLI with mruby that compiles binaries to Linux, OS X, and Windows
not threadsafe, because embedded- other lang should be handling that. procs and blocs yes.
“freedom patching”
mrbgem.rake
mgem (rubygems equiv)
“because were rubyists, we want to be able to test” I object to implying that this is caused solely by being a rubyist.
jruby-launcher - basedon 1996 netbeans IDE code
jkutner/mjruby
thing

Feminism talk with Carl Sagan quotes *step

awesome purple hair!
gifs, priviledge
tech culture
“our preferences do not determine what is true.” -sagan
stop making fun of php devs (agreed)
against fanactism
“very excited about whatever this person jut lit on fire.” (about a gif)

Hardware and acessibility (Ben Heck) *bike

sip and puff controllers for quadriplegics
guitar hero via foot pedals
“When I got my first 3D printer, the fist thing I printed was a lid to reseal spam. It even had a triangle part on the lid to slice the spam, for survival situations.” Spam Lid
oscilloscope watch, multimeter, battery in the watchband to reduce watch thickness
3d printer that prints two at once.
This talk needs better photography
“When your hobby becomes your job it makes your life a blurry mess” YES THIS

Evening expeditions: dinner (pick your own adventure) followed by the local childrens museum, complete with hamster wheel. Very cool.

Sunday:

In the morning: farmers market! Tasty. Having been to farmers markets in three or four states, this one is one of the most impressive I’ve seen. Lots of bakeries, cheese, maple, jerky, vegetables. Not much fruit right then. The traffic flow is pretty much one way, so if you want to backtrack you will be swimming upstream. (It is a circle around the capitol building)

Backstage tour!

Rails girls lightning talk

Diagnose cancer with machine learning *walk

Rubyfuza (african ruby conf)
Rubyconf kenya
There are 242 ruby developers in South Africa and 4322 in San Francisco (via github search) https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=location%3A%22South+Africa%22+language%3Aruby
https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075/
http://intelligence.dev/
https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

Tiny supercomputer (Ray Hightower) *walk

Big supercompters take lots of electricity http://top500.org/lists/2015/06/
http://rayhightower.com/
https://www.parallella.org/
finite element analysis
Slides

Surgical refactoring *bike

I disagree that changing code solely in order to increase application speed is “refactoring”. Speed is a feature. (Non-functional requirement.)
There are types of refactoring. cosmetic refactoring vs required-for-next-feature refactoring.
“just grab me at the afterparty” errr hopefully not literally and also who does that?
yay live testing onscreen!
“Yay! @nellshamrell shows its ok to write tests that “smell” in order to get valid coverage when preparing to refactor #MadPlusRuby” (tweet)
None of this is new to me, but seeing someone else run through refactorings is actually really great. I hadn’t realized how much this would be intersting to me, to see someone’s exact style even when it is almost exactly the style that I also use.

Automation is coming for the truck drivers (and everyone) by Dusty (Groupon) *bike

lolfail describing previous talk
“sole purpose in life” errr
“you took our jerbs” frankerstein
truck driver is the #1 job in most states in the US?? 3.5 mil people
fast food auto order
“It’s just a matter of time.”
“Sitting in the truck all day- not the height of thinking” But requires focussed attention and quality reflexes
The supercomputer Watson is going to medical school
simsensei depression-detecting robot
“people- at this point [in history] are much more willing to talk to a screen [than to a human about depression]”
http://www.digitalistmag.com/innovation/3-tech-innovations-will-blow-mind-01255760?source=email-us-bib-newsletter
Quill Writes good news articles. “Powered by Artificial Intelligence, Quill is our advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) platform for the enterprise that goes beyond reporting the numbers—it creates perfectly written narratives to convey meaning for any intended audience.”
taylor swift clip
The newest most important skill for employability in a post-automation world is social skills. Talking to people
Wow why are people inturrupting the talk?
“think about it”
What industry can adsorb 3.5 mil ppl at the jr level? None
universal basic income Experiemnts on cities so far show that medical and education is great, and productivity hit is smaller than expected.
“There is no hindering progress. We could try but I think we would fail.”
Empathy “How does your job affect the lower 80%, and how do you feel about that?”

Immutable infrastructure (Craig Buchek) *bike

TIL https://rawgit.com/
Audience member ducks onstage during the talk to grab their yoga-leftover waterbottle and phone and it is not weird (only at M+R)
Who here is doing software-defined networking? Only one hand goes up. I would expect a lot more than that- maybe it is audience composition.
http://boochtek.com/
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas-artifact-pipeline.html
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas-build-run-notifications.html
https://serverfault.com/questions/581069/spacewalk-kickstart-cobbler-pxe-dnsmasq
He is not a docker fan
Lets Encrypt! (is awesome, although running late)
devstructure blueprint - super cool but not updated for 2yr http://devstructure.com/blueprint/
bastion host (important concept that I wish he’d explained to the audience!)
DigitalOcean vs AWS
http://serverspec.org/ rspec tests for servers!!
fowler, bliki :) ThoughtWorks shoutout :)
remark.js used to create the slideshow

He Doesn’t Work Here Any More (trans-itioning in the tech industry) by Coraline Ada *hike

Puberty is already pretty terrible. “Imagine going through puberty… for the wrong sex.” (audience flinches)
“Puberty is permenant.”
It can be very comfoting to get your mind into the intellectual bubble. Outside feels don’t hurt there.
unluckygirl screenname
“It felt like falling down a mountain”
choosing names!
valleygirl accent
la vie en rose (a very good movie about transitioning)
aaron yay!
Organization: lgbtech
bbeditor lol
“I came out like any good geek would- via gist”
Current company: instructure. Cool!
“I had to learn to listen - a skill I’d never really developed as a male”
Project - Open Source for Women
“I’ve learned that, when you’re not fucking miserable all the time, (stuff)” This hit me in the feels
“And now I fucking own my SEO [search engine optimization]”
opalgate, “online oss princess of the month” omg wtf the internet O.o
Spoke at 14 conferences last year, 13 this year so far. Wow!
Metadata in communication!
“They were happy; their headers matched.”
pronouns
“You wouldnt tell a poor person- money is just a social construct! It’s just paper!”
Lessons Learned(crossout) Learning
It’s never too late to learn empathy
To me, this was the best presentation just for pure presenting power. You could hear the hush in the room. Even note-taking laptop screens dimmed to black, phones went face-down (but held ready for slide photos)

Overall/Misc thoughts:

Relatively little of this was new to me, and I am here for the new. (Someone in the coffee room was telling me about how zomg they were to see refactoring done in the way it was done on the screen. I am very glad about this.)
It was really nice to see people I recognized at a tech conference. This has only begun to happen to me very recently.
Travelling with someone who knows lots of people really changes my conference experience
People in the front row were using the stage as a foot-place. That was adorable. It was a “family” con.
This was a remarkably diverse conference, especially for ruby (I have occasionally been the only lady at 40+ person ruby meetups in SF/Chicago)
I love that this is a supportive enough environment that an MC who occassionally stutters is met with support and love.
At a break, someone described M+B to me as “Half ruby at best”. I agree that there was not 100% ruby-code-on-screen talks. As the last year of the conference, maybe they wanted to use it for its most useful purpose. I am totally ok with this. IMO, the website gave fair warning. In general I prefer strongly technical talks, but this was a god experience.
I am glad that I left for the airport before the ending-emotions singalong/group onstage hug/?
Attrition over the course of the day was pretty marked on Saturday. Probably hallway track / balcony seating?
There were five backup speakers! …How does that work?
Someone (in the audience) had written the raffle app. It was pretty cool. Better than names from hat. :)
There were relatively few people not in my generation in attendance.
I don’t like “pipeline” as a descriptor for (women in) tech. Pipelines have an end, and it is CEO. I want to stay by the second joint of the pipeline.
I have an allergic reaction to “spread the word”
Sending students from my old university to this conference would have been a good return on investment. …Maybe OSfeels confernce would work. Something near Chicago. Hmm.

TODOs for me

Harvard experiment detecting biases
Send this post to R to make them jealous. Give R his cool M+R shirt.

Humans I had seen before (yay!!) or chatted with onsite (also yay!)

Braintreep!
Ray of Chicago Ruby meetup
J.<3 (Chicago Ruby)
cczona (also &:conf)
Claire! (Chef)
Coroline Ada!
3 &:conf humans! :)
Dude who works at medical lab at univ madison, 2 rails devs for 40 apps- internal administration stuff
Dude who works for GE, “mostly devlops puppet/chef stuff”
Githubber (campfire/hipchat/slack/irc discussion)
Dude in the coffee room going zomg about the refactoring talk
famousish ruby dude

Idle thoughts: If I put on a conference, some of the talks would be…

A talk on advanced refactoring, with examples (just like like M+R)
Overview of recent diversity incidents in tech, with maybe a smattering of background (reference resources like Geek Feminism wiki etc)
Overview of the speaker’s favorite non-household-name startups of the last X years, with musings on the what-how-why of startups
Live demo where someone from the audience brings up a random computer without ruby installed and the speaker has to try to install ruby on it. Start with an easy one and then keep going until you’re out of time. Narrate.
Overview of ways to environment, tools, approaches, current ‘best’ (ansible, chef, puppet, docker, related tools)
Deep dive into current docker use cases
Deep dive into current bundler/rubygems ecosystem (ilke Andre did at AirBnB)- pay via donation to RubyTogether?
Basic social justice and feminism overview, principles of
Overview of recent incidents, and discuss resources- probably use parts of the geek feminism wiki as source material
Coroline Ada’s talk from M+R!
Several talks encouraged about cool recent applications of ruby (space, medical science, government, ??)
Several talks of discussion/walkthrough of an interesting current library (rspec, devise, or something smaller / niche)
(not a talk) Make a mailing list for speakers before the conf! To ask questions to.

Typofixes, questions, factual corrections, and feedback are welcome: please file an issue on github at https://github.com/compwron/compwron.github.io/issues or contact compiledwrong