The video embedded below contains the entirety of !!Con 2017’s day-one livestream, recorded May 6. Clicking it will cue up the ten-minute talk I delivered to its New York City audience that day. I describe how I overcame some early obstacles in BumpySkies development by pushing past my natural resistance against asking strangers for access to tools and data.

Here are my slides, rendered as a single long PDF with my script intermingled among the pages, often with only a few words per slide. Not the easiest to read this way, but it sheds some light on my public speaking style — I script my talks out entirely and deliver them as prepared monologues, gaining complete control of language and timing while giving up the display of even a single shred of spontaneity.

I had a great time at !!Con, and hope to attend again. If you missed it, you can vicariously and asynchronously join me via the whole first-day and second-day videos on YouTube, and I expect separate videos of the individual talks to appear presently.

An incomplete list of !!Con 2017 highlights, for me:

• Lisa Ballard on leading a hobbyist team that used public data to create spaceprob.es, a coffee-table-book-beautiful website tracking all the active robots that humanity has launched into space.

• Jean Cochrane’s whirlwind tour of landmark queer and feminist cyberpunk manifestos from the 1980s and onward.

• I kind of have no idea what Aaron Levin was talking about, but I want to point out his speaking style as essentially the opposite of my own, and far more entertaining.

• Kevin Chen has much better scripted comic timing than I do, and his talk about implementing HDR photographic techniques in Excel brought the house down.

• One talk described how the speaker and their employer engaged in a years-long arms race against an anonymous and gleefully civic-minded hobbyist obsessed with breaking their music-file DRM scheme. (This talk went unrecorded, on the speaker’s request. You should come to !!Con.)

• I watched superheroic stenographer Mirabai Knight type “Aaaaaaagh!!” — visible on the separate caption-screen that the conference had set up — as Mark Dominus screamed and flailed while imagining giant bats swooping upon him, partway through his talk.

I could go on, but… do just watch all the talks, if you can. Aside from the marvelous keynotes, each talk is only ten minutes long, and all very much worth your time. I’ll update this post with a link to the individual videos, when I notice that they’re available.