Finding the Fit

Just wrapped up attending Öredev 2025. I believe it is Sweden's largest developer conference. Certainly up there in size. 1200 attendees or so. I was a press partner of sorts but also ended up getting a talk accepted. I've spoken there three years now. First on Elixir as a web stack. Then as a late addition for their DevOps track covering how we ship software on devices with Nerves.

This time I spoke on hardware security. I of course referenced Nerves and Elixir but the content of the talk was how we practically secure hardware these days. What we can do. Typical constraints and limitations and I covered the usage of my work on adding a new volatile config option for that library and the specific chip. The talk seemed to land well. People seemed to like the contents fine and most people noted the slides where I did a variant of what I did for The Nerves Community Fleet at Code BEAM in Berlin last year. Different content though.

I completely missed Code BEAM Berlin this year due to this conference. Hopefully I have spread the good word and interest in Nerves and Elixir a little bit. With a bit of luck we'll get a very silly video out of the trip as well.

Way more likely to be productive is that I connected with a group of speakers that go to a lot of NDC (and other) events. Lots of .Net and more general software conferences which is decidedly not my scene. I'd like to explore going to larger events and reaching larger audiences with what I have to say though. I think I also need to work on what I pitch and in what way I approach that. I'm going to be smuggling Elixir in and if a conference wants a talk on Elixir, great. Most don't. But there are a lot of things I could cover which just happen to be in Elixir. The potential opportunity to further my agenda is kind of the crass aspect. 

Primarily it is incredibly satisfying to connect with other people who like to do the type of stuff I do. Speaking, presenting, trying things. The speakers have a band. Linebreakers. They make parody covers with programming, tech and software themes. They aren't overly serious and they are very funny. And from spending time with these other speakers I got a sense of their community and creative spirit. A lot of these people would get Goatmire. It'd be interesting to see if there are some speakers that'd be decent cross-overs.

It was a very good time as a conference. The organizers are sweethearts, the volunteers are awesome sports. Met so many great speakers and attendees. Now I'm glad to be mostly done with engagements for the year.

My brain is overflowing with things I want to do that require hands on keyboard.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.