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Ready-made talks

Turning 'wat' into 'why'

Take a trip through a dozen different programming languages and understand the 'why' behind the 'wat'.

Programming languages are repeatedly touted to have strange edge cases. Footguns. Wats. The canonical ‘wat’ talk shows some of these for Ruby and JavaScript, but doesn’t go into any detail into the ‘why’

In this talk, take a tour through a multitude of programming languages; and see not only the ‘wat’, but the ‘why’: is it a misunderstanding based on an assumption from another programming language? A compiler optimisation? A known bug that can’t be fixed due to backward compatibility concerns?

Attendees will come away from this talk with a greater understanding about how to turn a ‘wat’ into a ‘why’.

Made-to-order talks

Talks in this category are presented with the most up-to-date information on the topic as possible, and thus take more time to prepare

The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility 😓 of Unicode Adoption ✨

Emoji have a rich history, and a recent resurgence in Western culture. However, as social networks feverishly try and clamber into this bandwagon, their implementations create issues with miscommunication. From the technical to the social aspects, this talk will cover why the extended character set provided by Unicode needs to be treated with responsibility by users and platforms alike.

Communication is difficult. Whether between humans, machines, or a combination of the two, trying to translate meaningful information is a lossy process.

Converting programming languages to use the new Unicode standard is hard, but once it’s in place, you get this marvelous feature-add: emoji compatibility. No longer do we have to make faces with symbols or use platform-specific emoticons. Rejoice in the extended character set.

Emoji have a rich history as a way to allow the communication of ideas in a reduced amount of data. They date back to a time where this was important: SMS communications in Japan. However, as social networks feverishly try to clamber onto this bandwagon, their implementations of the standard are rife with potential for miscommunication.

We will discusses the history of emoji, cross-platform adoption, the Unicode standard, and emoji accessibility in web applications. ✨

Do any of these talks sound like something you would like to have for your conference? Get in touch!

All slides are hosted on GitHub. See also: pyvideo profile
Header and footer images by Bartek Pawlik, used under CC BY-NC 2.0

 
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