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Confoo 2017

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Art of the magic card named New Perspectives

Written by Mallory Allen

2017-12-10

Confoo 2017 Highlights

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I finally made it to a conference outside Ottawa this year. Despite my boyfriend and I coming down with a pretty bad flu, it was a great experience with a diverse array of speakers. There was a lot of really cool content that appealed to me oddly specifically at times.

Doing a lightning talk about GraphQL

It was fun. I was unprepared. I will not be posting it.

Web Components / Polymer

I was really excited for Google's Polymer when it first came out, even building a large prototype for a client with version 0.5, and I still have a bunch of toy apps on my github that used it. That said, I've found that it's been a bit out of step with the rest of the javascript world since then, with HTML Imports being dropped from specs and the death of 2-way data-binding I found myself drawn back to react land.

I was excited to see that there were a few cool polymer presentations and stories about people using Polymer at scale, and it was brought to my attention that Polymer 3 promises to bring it closer to the rest of the js ecosystem by embracing npm and es6 modules.

Some real world Polymer projects

Machine Learning

I am far from a machine learning expert, which made all of the talks on Cognitive services and Machine learning in the cloud incredibly interesting to me. I even spent a couple hours implementing a for-fun app on this blog using Microsoft's Cognitive Services api.

I might play around with it a bit more and see if I can build my own ML model for cat-recognition instead of using the out-the-box one, so check back later to see how it's progressed 😄.

Getting 💩 done

David Zuelke of Heroku gave a talk on the GTD system of task management.

It was pretty inspiring and I'll be trying to do some kind of cargo-cult imitation of it using Todoist for a while 😅.

Asteroid Mining

Paul Fenwick gave a really cool talk on space industry that I will absolutely not be able to do justice, but it was really cool and you should go look up that stuff right now.

The City

BC and Vancouver are incredibly beautiful!

The vancouver wall center Really pretty lights Truck

The Food

The food at the conference was absolutely tip top. Pics speak for themselves. I wish I'd remembered to take pictures of more dishes, but I just ate them too fast.

omg so good delicious food

Till next time

Check out my instagram, I'll be posting more pics as I have free time to look through them :)