!!Con West 2019 Notes

A conference about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing!

!!Con is a conference held every spring in New York City. It’s two days of lightning talks that can be about anything related to computers!

At the beginning of last year’s !!Con, I wrote:

This conference is a great showcase of the diverse backgrounds of the NYC tech scene. I’m really going to miss it when I move back to the Bay Area.

Fortunately, I spoke too soon! This year, we got !!Con West, held at UC Santa Cruz, which might be the UC campus with the most redwood trees. Here are my notes.

A staircase from a building leads to a trail head.

Contents

Day 1 Keynote

The Best Parts! Of My Favorite Things!

Lynn Cyrin

Session 1

IMUs FTW!! Building IMU-based gesture recognition!

Jennifer Wang

EarthBound’s almost-Turing-complete text system!

Alex Rasmussen

/etc/services is made of people! (and also ports!)

Breanne Boland

“Wheels within whiles!” or possibly “Whiles within wheels!”

Michael Albaugh

Sadly, I had to leave early on the first day.

Day 2 Keynote

Glitch Nuggets of Resistance!

VJ Um Amel

Session 5

Guiding a starship with noise! And blinking!

Simon Porter

The secret life of Not-a-Number!

Annie Cherkaev

Hacking Lego! Computer generated Lego instructions!

Michael Knowles

The world’s first racing-the-beam ray tracer on discarded FPGA hardware!!!

Tom Verbeure

Session 6

Robots, rockets, and more! Control theory in 10 minutes

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels

Minimax search and the structure of cognition!

Zack M. Davis

Postgres plays Pokémon!

Liz Frost

Software patterns… from the 9th century?!!

Michael Arntzenius

Session 7

How to throw out 95% of pixels in virtual reality, without anyone noticing!!

Amrita Mazumdar

How to calculate the phase of the moon very, very badly!

André Arko

Value Your Types!

Eric Weinstein

The Conjuring: ransomware edition!!

Pranshu Bajpai

Session 8

Observability in the Kitchen: Improve Your Breadmaking Skills with Open-Source Monitoring!!

Daisy Tsang

Computers are fast! But how come they sometimes feel slow?

Mike Lazer-Walker

My, my, TTY!

Tabitha Sable

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying my writing, I’d love to send you infrequent notifications for new posts via my newsletter. You’ll receive the full text of each post, plus occasional bonus content.

You can also follow me on Twitter (@kevinchen) or subscribe via RSS.