FutureStack and DevelopHer

{Future}Stack13

FutureStack was a two-day tech conference put on by New Relic last Thursday and Friday. New Relic is a company that does performance monitoring, which means that if you made an app like Facebook or Pinterest, you would ask New Relic to monitor how quickly every part of your program is running so that if something is consistently taking two minutes to load you know you have a problem somewhere in that part of your program. New Relic is a sizable company and they have so far hired two Hackbright alums. Because New Relic loves Hackbright so much, they gave us all free tickets (normally $600/person).

Side note: We were all given business cards for the conference. That was exciting.

Thursday we registered and got our name badges, which were basically little Arduinos that sync to your phone and keep track of your information. This meant you could hold your name badge up to another person's name badge, your name badge would blink while info was being transmitted, and your phone app would now have that person's contact info. It also gave points for the number of "connections" you made and they had a running contest with prizes for the most points throughout the conference. At one point I was 14 on the leader board. That was cool. You could also hold your badge up against a board outside each room to rate the quality of the talk you had just seen. We were also given swag bags, which included a t-shirt, decals, a cord organizer, and a few other fun things, all in a sweet little tote bag with the FutureStack logo on it.

Thursday morning's keynote was by the CTO of New Relic, followed by an amazing talk by this woman named Hilary Mason, who works with big data. Then we spent the rest of the day going to several smaller talks. I really wanted to go to the Cake concert afterwards, but I knew I would be too exhausted for the hackathon on Friday if I stayed late on Thursday.

Friday's tech talks were also really fun and I learned a lot. Plus we were given awesome bento boxes with our lunch, and free wrap-up iPhone chargers. Also on Friday, I got my project semi-approved! Yay! More on that later. Liz high-fived me for promoting Hackbright a lot while I was at the conference. It was pretty fun to meet people and talk about what Hackbright does.

My Favorite Talks

Julia Grace from Tindie gave a fantastic talk about hardware and how arduino and raspberry pi  have lowered the barrier to entry for people to play with hardware and software. During her presentation, she showed a picture of my team at the hardware hackathon as well as a video of the LeapMotion-controlled robot that one of my classmates worked on at the hardware hackathon. She also gave an awesome shout out to Hackbright.

Another talk I really enjoyed was by Etan Lightstone of New Relic. He talked about data visualization and design. It was a very informative and (obviously) visual talk.

There was an awesome talk called Surviving the Offline Apocalypse by a guy named Joel Worall, who is the CTO of Cure International. He talked about how to keep places like hospitals online that are in remote areas in developing countries. The work they do at Cure is really amazing.

I also particularly loved a talk called Nerd Life Balance by Nick Floyd. He talked about bringing your enthusiasm for tech home and teaching your kids, your spouse, your friends, and anyone who wants to learn. He has five children and they all play with hardware and enjoy hacking their xbox games so that they never lose. He also talked about being more productive and satisfied by allowing your work and personal life to be more congruent. After the talk I went up to talk to the speaker to tell him how much I enjoyed his presentation. When he found out I was from Hackbright he said, "Oh! Awesome! I have something for you." It turns out he had a stash of Rasperry Pis that he was giving out to Hackbrighters, and I got his last one! I was extremely excited and thanked him profusely. More about my awesome raspberry pi and what I'm doing with it later.

DevelopHer

I had to leave the conference a bit early on Friday to meet up with my mom so that we could make our way down to LinkedIn in Mountain View for their all-female hackathon, DevelopHer. I was super tired, so a lot of it is a huge blur, but basically we made an awesome game:

When the game starts, this is what you see:

After you pick up your poo and collect your bones to put in your dog house, you get stars:

The game logic was fairly basic: you can't pick up your poo unless you have a bag, and you can't go into your dog house until you have cleaned up your poo and collected your bones. It was super fun to build and we got to meet some cool people too. It was fun munching on LinkedIn's cafeteria food. They have a nice variety, but we mostly took advantage of their soft serve with hot fudge, chips, protein bars, peanut m&m's, fruit-infused water, soda, salads, and free breakfast/lunch/dinner/cupcakes. They also gave us weird shirts that we probably won't wear because they aren't t-shirts and I don't know how to handle it. We went home to sleep and returned the next morning, but most people spent the night at LinkedIn.

It was super fun presenting our project and people commented on how cool it was that we were doing this as a mother-daughter activity. I was proud :)

Raspberry Pi

I am really excited about my raspberry pi, and John and I are trying to make some cool things happen. I don't want to give away too much yet because I'm not done putting stuff together. But stayed tuned for more on this topic. All you need to know so far is that we installed linux on it and I can actually program on it and save things on it, which is pretty cool.

I Have No Time and There's So Much Going On

I'm sorry I was lame and didn't post for a long time. It's getting really difficult to keep my blog up to date. Many ups and downs, some more crying at Hackbright, a ton of high-fiving and cracking up, crazy weekend adventures, John being an amazing husband and supporting me through everything, and meetings with my mentors in which I flail about and they somehow turn that into meaningful units of understanding. I will try to post soon about our movie ratings app featuring grumpy cat, changes to my project design, and a giant-whiteboard heist that involved some major, real-life geometry and a small gash oozing blood.