Muncie DevFest 2019

I was invited to speak at DevFest Muncie 2019, an event hosted by my friend and colleague Chris Turvey, who runs the Muncie Google Developer Group. I've known about DevFest for a few years, but this was the first time I had the chance to attend. My oldest son and I went together, and it was fun to share the day with him. The morning speakers included talks about playing music over a 300-baud modem on a C128, how to design custom circuit boards, smart cities, developing experimental audio systems using Javascript and Firebase, along with my own humble contribution, a brief discussion of Kaiju Kaboom.

One of the reasons I'm writing this post is simply to share a link to my slides. Like most of my presentations, the slides will not make a whole lot of sense without the stories to support them, but I want to make them available nonetheless. The slide showing my sales got a hearty applause when I explained that there is no animation or anything—that's just the chart.

In the afternoon, my son and I joined a workshop introducing Particle products and services. It was the first time I have gotten my hands dirty with IoT technology or, really, with anything in that hardware hacker space. The integration of their technology is really amazing to me, since I understand at least the theory of how each part works. And yet, despite this, it took us over an hour to get an LED to blink on a board. As for me, I think I'll stay in softwareland, but it does seem that my son's interest was piqued. Thanks to the sponsorship of Particle, we were able to take the boards home with us, so as soon as I get them rigged up to my home Wi-Fi network, he should be able to tinker some more.

Thanks to Chris and the rest of his co-organizers, as well as the MadJax staff and the other sponsors. It was a nice day to share with developers of all experience levels from the region.