QCon 2016 - My Best Of

This was my second year attending QCon New York. It is an interesting conference, where market leaders & innovators come and present their ideas, implementations, challenges and what worked for them. There is always a stream of knowledge and wisdom to be gained at this conference.

A could do a quick run down of the sessions I was able to attend, and what I liked, disliked, but rather I'm just going to point out some of the jewels by my experience. Talks which I attended and absolutely loved. When the presentations are made available, I would recommend a must watch!

Engineering the Red Planet

Dr. Anita Sengupta gave an amazing presentation on the "Curiosity Rover" landing on Mars and the 7 minutes of terror. The excitement in the room was way beyond any sci-fi finale. There were interesting questions on testing, and other details around the project. Makes you think, you are doing microservices, and others are planning missions to mars! Some links around the same topic.

Membership, Dissemination and Population Protocols

I went in totally unprepared on what to expect for this talk. Sean Cribbs was presenting it & explained different cluster related protocols. Off late after suffering a few cluster related outages, it was an interesting insight into the protocols. The major takeaways were the papers he linked in the talk, here is the tweet related to it.


Crafting with JavaScript: Computing with Textiles

Mariko Kosaka did an awesome presentation on running Johnny Five on an Arduino. The exciting part was not running Johnny Five, but the whole presentation of her learning process of converting an 8 bit image to 2 bit image. She was knitting using a 1980's knitting machine. The machine's PLC was replaced with Arduino. This is a true talk about the journey rather than the destination. The most unexpected and most favourite talk of all the QCons attended so far.

Go check her github for all her projects

JavaScript in Space (Or, There and Back Again)

Since I've seen Thomas goes to Space, I always wanted to try this out with my kids, but was never able to solve the problem of retrieving the device back. Dan's talk was close to heart, cos he used a Raspberry Pi and also found a solution which can help retrieve the device back,

Trackuino is a GPRS device which uses radio signals can help find the location of the package after the balloon has busted and parachute is launched. Check his code at github. Dan gives true hope, that even if you cannot Get Your Ass to Mars, you can still get to "near space"

Check the videos out when they are released. I have early access to them, but they will soon be made available to you peasants too.

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