Developers Love Bacon - conference
> BACON is a two-day conference on all the things developers love.
And that is exactly what it is. A friendly get together of people that like to code and other things they are interested in. All talks are limited to 30 min and come in a huge variety. Thus the talks are more about general inspiration than about hard facts.
Due to the fact, that the conference runs two tracks in parallel I could only attend about half of the talks.
My Highlights
FROM COLO TO YOLO: CONFESSIONS OF THE ANGRIEST ARCHIVIST
Jason Scott, was probably the most entertaining and passionate speaker at the conf. What starts out a bit wired and arty progresses into a talk that conveys his passion for saving the cultural data that is hosted and bound inside all the new shiny online services (instagram for cats anyone?). Specially in cases where all the data is about to permanently to disappear, with 30 days notice.
Everyone likes music. So does PJ Hagerty. Given the right mix you can increase your concentration and get cleverer, at least for a couple of minutes / hours. Watch PJs talk for more information and a great presentation of what is possible with music and how you can get new listening material that is both new and interesting.
Seth Vargo has a condition. While his OCD can drive him crazy during a normal day out and about, he found that it also comes in handy in his job as a Dev and also makes him ridiculously efficient when it comes to shopping. This talk gives a delightful view into a very orderly mind and makes a point that you can live your life with OCD.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WORK-LIFE BALANCE (WORKING WITH BURNOUT)
Adam Onishi talks about having Burnout. I learned that it is not something that happens to you, but a tendency of overworking yourself, which will happen again if you are not careful. Apparently a strong intrinsic motivation, which lets you accomplish great things, is also the reason why you overwork yourself. A very personal talk.
WHISK(E)Y: THE BEST DRINK IN THE WORLD
At the bacon is somewhat famous for having at least one talk about booze :). While you will not be able to take part in the wisky tasting Billy Abbott still holes an interesting talk about the process of actually creating the spirit. Did you know that it is basically distilled beer?
SWEATY HORSE BLANKET - PROCESSING THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF BEER
Being a bit overwhelmed with the sheer about of choice of beer in Londoner pubs, Ben Fields sets out to apply Natural language processing (NLP) to tackle the problem. Another highly informative and very entertaining talk. Obviously one can not teach the math behind things like Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) in a 30 min. talk, but he manages to give the gist across and just show what is possible with a bunch of text and an understanding of a domain.
YOUR WEB STACK WOULD BETRAY YOU IN AN INSTANT
Security is a tricky thing. Tim Perry reiterates some exemplary incidents of different parts of the web stack in a funny well structured way. He also reminds us that best practices are best practices for a reason and that many of the incidents could have been avoided if people would run the test they have and read their bug trackers.
Conclusion
I really liked the Bacon 2014 for its lineup of interesting talk about all kind of things. You will probably not experience an scientific talk about implementation details or the latest distributed algorithm, but chances are you stumble across a talk that sparks an interest in Wisky, Arduino programming or even Powerlifting.