Keeping it Weird Portland

Portland, I think I'm in love with you. I've now been out to visit you twice and I have had a great time on both occasions. This time out I started off my trip by doing my presentation on Android Speech Recognition at OSCON. I had a decent number of attendees to the presentation and some good engagement from the people who have bothered to rate my talk. I find it hard to be really informative when you only have 40 minutes to talk. I focused on imparting information and telling jokes rather then running though code. If anyone is interested you can always download my slides or check out the code of my example application on my github repo.

Next up on Thursday I got a chance to relax and enjoy the conference where I saw some great presentations. In particular the one on Hacking Your Body: Running as Performance Tuning by Dave Neary was great. Not unlike myself Dave ran into problems with IT Band Syndrome so I was interested to hear what he could do to work around the problem and the answer is something I've hit upon myself, Interval Training. Also, Mary Jane Kelly did this great talk on using an EEG monitor to mind control an Arduino robot.

Thursday night I got a chance to meet up with former Ottawa dweller and now Netflix employee Dan Menard for supper and attending the GitHub Drink Up. Much thanks for the folks at GitHub for putting on the event and for putting out such a great product in GitHub. All the PhoneGap developers were in attendance as well so it was great getting a chance to hang out for everyone again.

Friday was the extremely well attended and sold out PhoneGap Day. There were a metric ton of great presentations and if you want to check out mine on my side project Corinthian you can grab my slides. I met a bunch of folks IRL that I only know from twitter and the PhoneGap Google Group. Rather than to list everyone and accidentally insult someone by missing their name let me just say it was great to meet all of you.

Till next time Portland!