Pleased to announce that I plan to speak about BumpySkies, my air-travel turbulence forecaster, at two conferences in the early summer. (One of them you can still get tickets to!)

At !!Con in New York City, on the weekend of May 6-7, I shall present a ten-minute talk titled I wrote to a dead address in a deleted PDF and now I know where all the airplanes are!! (The conference organizers require all talk titles to contain exclamation marks — but please do read my excitement as genuine.) In it, I shall describe my initial challenges developing BumpySkies, and how I largely overcame them by asking strangers for stuff, nicely.

!!Con (pronounced “Bang-bang con”) seems to be one of those conferences who tickets all vanish within literal minutes of their becoming available, and those minutes all ticked by a week ago. Happily, it appears that !!Con films all of its talks and puts them all online; this YouTube playlist contains all of 2016’s talks, for one. (And, come to think of it, I should watch a few before I make my own…)

A month later, I will present BumpySkies: a passion-project postmortem at The Perl Conference in Alexandria, Virginia on the week of June 19. This talk will focus more on BumpySkies’ technical aspects, complementing the social-engineering facets that the !!Con talk will cover.

I have become somewhat of a Perl Conference (née YAPC::NA) regular, at least on odd years — debuting myself with a lightning talk about project focus in 2013, and following up with a presentation on Plerd (the software powering this blog) in 2015. I always enjoy this little conference and look forward to attending again this year, where for the first time I plan to take in one of the day-long seminars that bookend the main event. (And — unlike !!Con — tickets for TPC tend to remain available right up through the opening keynote, in my experience.)

Finally, I’ve got my eye on All Things Open, an autumnal open-source software conference in Raleigh. I haven’t attended before, and I declined to pitch a talk this year (in part because I already had two submissions awaiting their fates — see above — and, unused to pitching severally, I didn’t wish to overextend myself). However, it has pinged my radar in the past, and it came up on the shortlist of recommended conferences when I asked my Twitter followers for recommendations. I learned about !!Con through this same route, and thus does 2017 look like an unusually conference heavy year for me already. I asked for it! No complaints.