2024 Q1 Event - Speakers and Format

[allella]

Committed Speakers

6:20 - 6:35

Gavin Coyle — 15 mins on Addressing Workforce Planning Challenges Through Mentorship

6:35 - 6:50

Paul — 15 mins on Censorship-resistant P2P Messaging via Briar and the Local-first Software Movement.

7:00 - 7:40

Breakout Room 1

• Bogdan Kharchenko — 15 mins on Data Transfer Objects with PHP, as used by HackGreenville.com
• Jim Ciallella — 5 mins on Lean Livin': How the Local Internet Provider Paid Me $6240 / hr
• Christina Roberts — 10 mins on Volunteer Opportunities w/ Agile Learning Institute

Breakout Room 2

• Brian Kennedy — 15 mins on You're Doing IaC Wrong
• Jās Eckard — 5 mins on Intro to UCLUG and BASH's History Feature
• Pamela Wood Browne — 10 mins on Intro to Code With The Carolinas and Current Projects

Backup / Future Talks

• Barry Jones - (As a backup) Lightning Talk | Ruby ActionMailbox for Parsing Inbound Emails
• Luke Kapustka (LukeTech on Slack) on Pros and Cons of 5G Home Internet Service - inspired by a Feb 2024 Slack thread

Notes

• The Oct 2023 pilot event speakers and topics are listed on the Meetup event.
• The pilot notes contain potential speakers, and potential future speakers / ideas / topics.
• We agreed to post a call for speakers and in #random on the Slack and Jim will reach out to people who expressed interest for the pilot event.

Format

• Pam suggested "at least one speaker before breaking out into other rooms"
• Eric suggested we may have the potential speakers help define the format / time slots.
• Jim suggested a balance would be a single track speaker of perhaps 20-25 minutes max and the rest of the event as break outs / multi-track.

Tasks (In-advance)

• [x] TODO: Setup a web form to gather relevant details from speakers: (doesn't exist, do for Spring 2024 event)
  • Speaker's Name
  • Talk Title
  • Public Link to Slides (optional)
  • Talk Length(s)
  • Needs: video cables, podium, whiteboard, audio speakers, time clock, projector, etc
• [x] Reach out to speakers who have previously expressed interest
• [x] Post a call for speaker / talk submissions in #community-organizers
• [x] If needed, post a call for speaker / talk submissions in #general or #random a week or so after posting in #community-organizers
• [x] Offer lightning talks to organizers of groups which are on hiatus or which have low attendance
• [x] If needed, ask community partners to promote the call for speakers to their relevant audience
• [x] Have a backup speaker for when someone is sick or can’t make it.
• [x] Advise speakers to come with proper video adapters to connect their laptop via HDMI
• [x] TODO Consider grading the talks on skill / knowledge level: newbie, intermediate, advanced and having a mix of different levels
• [x] Connect with speakers to share details (audio / video setup, share Wi-Fi details, time slots, attendee expectations (like expecting people to come and go during the talks), and where to park and how to enter the building
• [x] Ask if speakers need any special equipment, like power cords, whiteboards & markers, podium, audio speakers, time clocks, projector
• [x] Suggest that speakers come early to test Wi-Fi, video, and other connections
• [x] Survey speakers to see if they are interested in a basic Jitsi or Zoom video recording and/or paying for a more professional edited video option

Tasks (At the Event Venue)

• [ ] Take a photo of the space before hand so things can be put back where they were
• [ ] Prepare the conference rooms (move the white tables to the empty hall past the men's room at OpenWorks)
• [ ] If opening the partition in the conference room
  • [ ] Get Jim Ciallella to help, or else contact the security desk for help, as the wall requires special know-how and has been damaged in the past by unskilled folks messing with it.
  • [ ] WARN people about putting their fingers in the seams
  • [ ] WARN people to move the TVs away from the wall before folding the wall
• [ ] Position and erase whiteboards
• [ ] Confirm audio / video / internet is working for the presenters
• [ ] Double-check that the presenters brought proper HDMI to Laptop adapters
• [ ] Turn on TVs and set to the correct “source”
• [ ] Remind speakers to test the HDMI and do a dry run to make sure they have what they need

[eric1234]

Now that we likely have a date picked, it seems getting speakers lined up would be great as that can help promote the event. You mentioned reaching out to certain people that expressed interest before which I think is fine to do. I'm thinking also just invite anyone on #community-organizers to DM if they are interested. If we don't get enough interest between there and people you reach out to we can then link to that invite on #random to cast a wider net.

That invite of course should welcome software dev talks. But also put extra emphasis on non-software related hacktivities. The home page of HG says we are "Upstate SC tech hackers, makers, and tinkerers". Ideally I want our events to reflect that diversity and not have it just be software development.

Finally the invite should also mention the desire for lightening talks. 5, 10, 15 minute talks would be very welcome. This gets more voices presenting and allows attendees more choice. But obviously we can only do a format with lightening talks if people volunteer to give them.

[allella]

The next HG Nights will be on Feb 29th from 6 PM to 8 PM.

The format / time slots may be different from the pilot. If so, then suggestions from the potential speakers will likely inform any changes.

Eric Anderson was planning to make a general announcement in the HackGreenville Slack and I offered to give a heads up to those who had previously expressed interest.

I'm pinging some of you / them in this thread and will reach out over email for those who aren't part of the HG GitHub organization.

• Ryan Szrama
  • quest to become a legitimate Roblox earner, helping my kids learn Scratch, eCommerce idea
  • I reached out over email. He's on vacation, so we'll see if he is still interested.
  • Ryan is a DrupalCon keynote speaker and local who we don't see out much, so I'm hopeful to get him engaged locally for at least special occasions like HG Nights or CCC.
• UpstatePHP / @bogdankharchenko - Jacob Adelberg (@jadelbe418) has been keen on having PHP talks at HackGreenville Nights instead of restarting the monthly UpstatePHP.
  • Bogdan didn't make the pilot event, but it sounded like he had a talk in mind.
  • @stevenwadejr also seemed interested, but not sure if that was PHP or not, probably a non-PHP talk
  • Zach Robichaud did a PHP talk at the pilot event, which Jacob helped organize
• Alex Dresko @alexdresko - VS Code Dev Containers - couldn't make the pilot, but wanted to talk at the next HG Nights. I believe he has a newborn, so I'll check to see if this fits his schedule.
• Terraform @sirbeep / Brian Kennedy - What Not to Do - he wasn't ready for the pilot, but may be interested
• Christina Roberts
  • she was interested in doing one of our quick "HG Gives" 5 minute talks, like Synergy Mill and HackGreenville Labs did during the pilot before or after the 40 minute speaker's slot.
  • she organized the summer high school program that a number of HG members got involved in, but she may want to talk about other volunteer ops too.
• Roskam / Eric Anderson @eric1234 - Comparison of Blaze, Addy.io, Firefox Relay, SimpleLogin, DDG Email Protection, Apple's Hide My Email - Based on HG Slack conversation
• Ryan Edge / Charlotte Google Developer Group
  • He also submitted a talk for CCC, so that's probably a better fit instead of him coming to town for a 2 hour event.
  • I didn't have a good feel for why he wanted to start a Greenville GDG besides he said Google with pay for some events and you have access to their experts
  • I don't really want to be Google's pet, so a local GDG isn't much motivation. Though, he did mention Flutter was a popular topic at their events and said he could do a Flutter talk. There was some interest in the HG channels around Flutter about the time he dropped in.
  • Said he could do a talk on building apps full-stack with Flutter & Dart. Lives in Charlotte, so would need to confirm in advance and have a back-up
• JP Laskis
  • I don't recall if he was serious about speaking, but I invited him and he does some really neat mechanical stuff, so I think he'd have interesting content to share
  • robot/machine that handles graded sports/pokemon cards. Automatic dog treat dispenser
• Trey Grainger - search algorithms / AI search / Presearch - I'm not sure if he has the time, but he's done some really technical search stuff for companies like Home Depot, and this was well before AI became all of the rage
• Bobby Cannon - off-grid solar install pros and cons - Jim asked Bobby, but no reply as of Sept 1.
• Alan Johnson - talk about the process behind his RFID garden stake start-up
• Chris F on community gardens
• I'd personally like to do a talk on lean living / saving / fixing / Local Life Hacks, but I don't really have an organized talk, so I'm probably going to keep kicking the can since I'm too busy organizing to make time for such things
• Barry Jones suggested two Carolina Code Conference submissions (Robert Roskam and Ryan Lanciaux) for the pilot event. It seems like we have a lot of potential speakers already, but we could ask Barry for local suggestions if we need more ideas.
• There are other themes without a person listed in the pilot Google Docs
  • HG Slack sparked debates / conversations - ex. Typescript strong typing vs plain old Javascript attracted a lot of comments in the Slack
  • HG Duels - examples : UpstatePHP’s MySQL vs PostgreSQL talk where Barry Jones and Benjamin Young talked about their tool of choice with a Q&A at the end, Vim vs eMacs, etc, Gnome vs KDE

[brightball]

If you need a backup speaker, just let me know. I can always put something together to talk about if there's a need to fill in.

[eric-hemasystems]

I'm thinking I'm going to go ahead and link my call for speakers in #random just to cast a bigger net since we haven't been flooded with offers yet. I imagine some folks are still figuring out if they want to do it or not but it would also be nice to get it locked down in the next weekish for promotion purposes.

[bogdankharchenko]

I could whip up quick talk about php/laravel/eco system - maybe some other ideas, how long are the talks? 10-15mins?

[eric-hemasystems]

Length is mostly up to you.

Last time they were 40m, but we are interested in changing that up a bit, but that largely depends on what people have to offer. I think it would be great to get more voices doing some sort of lightening talks while still having some longer talks doing a deep dive.

So basically just let us know what you want to do and once we get that info from folks we can figure out a schedule to try to support that.

[allella]

Pam expressed a desire for a single track and then split into a multi-track. So, you'd imagine if we're going to do a longer, single-track that it would be something with the most broad appeal so we don't subject a bunch of folks to 30 minutes of a talk they might not want to hear, either because it's not their thing or because the level is too advanced or too beginner.

We have CCC and meetups for long and focused tech talks, so perhaps HG Nights continues to find a sweet spot between the meetup group format and the conference format.

Also, software talks probably aren't going to have the broadest appeal, though we do expect software talks.

If we have a single track for part of the event, then I'd personally be most interested in something that crosses hardware and software and life. Like, if Bobby Cannon did his talk and shared struggles on setting up an off-grid solar project on his property, which had all of these features.

[brightball]

Would you like me to send a post to the conference social channels letting people know about HG Nights events or just keep it in Slack?

[allella]

For speakers, we're starting with the backlog and the Slack #community-organizers channel. The next step after that is an announcement in #random or #general if we don't get enough speakers / submissions.

If that doesn't yield results, then posting to social and the partner audiences (CCC, Build Carolina, Synergy Mill, etc) seems like a reasonable next step.

[eric-hemasystems]

Just FYI, I did drop a reference in #random on friday. Also your reach out for Bobby today mentions it. So we are already advertising on #random.

So far we have interest from:

• Bogdan for some PHP stuff although not sure if he's committed.
• Brian - This is a maybe.
• Barry - As a possible backup.

I did also mention it on the DC864 forum as a "save the date" as well as call for speakers hoping to get a security talk.

We can still give it some time to see what other interest we get since I think the "save the date" you suggested has it on people's radar already. But locking it down sooner rather than later is also good so we can make the meetup announcement and do any other promotion.

[allella]

I had a couple other potential folks in the other comments who said they are interested.

I've added your list to the top with those folks and will ping them too.

@ChristinaDRoberts @bogdankharchenko @sirbeep @brightball @gavincoyle If you're still interested in pitching a talk, even if it's as a maybe / backup, then this GitHub issue is a place to provide details on topic, proposed length (or lengths if you could make it variable), and other questions.

Thanks

[brightball]

Sure I can toss out some ideas. I've had a couple of people ask me for a "So...you want to run a conference" talk that would probably be entertaining if nothing else. I can whip up a talk on Gitlab, Email security/DMARC/Phishing, Elixir, Ruby, PostgreSQL or something related to any of them.

I've been working on a side project for a while that I'm hoping to get out in private beta soon that's a DMARC tool so that's one I'd definitely appreciate the opportunity to talk about.

[allella]

@brightball I think the broad hope is for talks which complement and don't compete for attention with the active meetups and conferences.

More broadly, it would be nice to cover more topics than software. So, some talks that don't focus entirely on a language or tool, but rather an idea, protocol, or real-world / personal application which can certainly still showcase a tool or language in the process of sharing how the idea or problem was approached.. If someone wants to do a more focused language or tool talk, then hopefully we have a local meetup or conference to be a next step for them after sharing the idea at an HG Nights.

I'm not itching to talk, since I'm more engaged with the organizing, but an example is that I use Puppeteer to automate some of my business and personal tasks. From creating a dashboard of screenshots of websites, to clicking buttons on payout reports, it does some handy stuff. I wouldn't geek out on the code for a HG Nights as much as show the solution to real world problems. Then, if I wanted to get into the guts, I'd probably do a more focused shell scripts + Puppeteer @ UCLUG.

That's an off the cuff of how I'm thinking about HG Nights fitting into the local equation.

The exception here may be groups like UpstatePHP, who aren't meeting, but are interested in doing a "PHP" talk at each HG Nights. I think that's fine and if they grow back into a monthly meetup, then cool. If they just tack a PHP talk onto HG Nights events, then that seems cool too.

[avon61002]

hi all, I would be happy to do around 30min on an open source project I have been contributing to for the past few years called Briar and how it connects to the larger Local-first software movement.

[brightball]

@allella understood. Feel free to mark me down as a backup if you need somebody though. I can pull together something interesting on any of those.

Ruby ActionMailbox would be an easy talk to give too. Been doing a lot of work with that to parse inbound emails.

[allella]

Thanks. Your suggestions have been added to the list on the top of this thread.

We're figuring out some of the format and selection for this event on the fly. We'll probably see what other speaker ideas come in this week and see if we have enough commitments to put together a good mix of talks.

@avon61002. I see you are "Paul" on the HG Slack.

• Did you want to go with a full name?
• we may have a mix of shorter lightning talks (5, 10, 15 minutes based on Eric's suggestion above). Would you be able to do a shorter format than 30 mins if that turns out to be the direction for this event instead of the 30/40 minute format we did for the pilot?

@brightball noted. Thanks. Thoughts on 5, 10, 15 minute lightning talk for this one?

[brightball]

Sure, put me down for lightning talk.

Using Rails ActionMailbox to Efficiently Process Inbound Emails

[avon61002]

Did you want to go with a full name?

If it's alright, I would prefer just "Paul" for any talk descriptions :)

we may have a mix of shorter lightning talks (5, 10, 15 minutes based on Eric's suggestion above). Would you be able to do a shorter format than 30 mins if that turns out to be the direction for this event instead of the 30/40 minute format we did for the pilot?

Yeah sure, I'll probably only be able to cover Briar, with only a small tie-in to the bigger local first space at the end, but I can fit it down to 15min no problem.

[allella]

I may have a 5 minute lightning talk to share.

"How Spectrum paid me $6240 per hour for talking to their support"

[chruck]

I am offering a 5-minute Lightning Talk to introduce UCLUG and a little about BASH's history feature.

[gavincoyle]

I have a talk I can share in a 5, 10, 15, or 30-min version on "Addressing workforce planning challenges through mentorship"

Here is a Google doc I can share with those who want to peek at the description/slides

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D4Yav9pur1XpK9sITUabXchioTw59XNjBSNZFY5Z9dQ/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you @allella for all your support and drive here!

[ChristinaDRoberts]

I see there are a lot of lightning talks already listed, so you can put me down for a 5 or ten min talk if theres room after the others. I will speak on volunteer opportunities.

[chruck]

On the topic of local user group/meetup promotion, "have a table with fliers/cards OR a whiteboard?", it occurs to me that even if I have fliers that I remember to bring promoting my group, others (or I) may forget fliers/cards, or may be unaware that fliers/cards should have been brought, or might want to get a feeler for interest in a new group. So, I propose both: an area with both a whiteboard that has hand-written announcements AND a table for fliers/cards of same.

[sirbeep]

Brian's "You're doing IaC wrong" confirmed for 15 mins. Just covering project based terraform, devsecops/pipeline/etc. broken into separate talks for later.

[allella]

Speakers,

Please see the draft speaker schedule at the top of this issue and share any feedback by 7 PM tonight.

@avon61002 @gavincoyle @bogdankharchenko @ChristinaDRoberts @sirbeep @chruck

Thanks

[gavincoyle]

That looks great and I appreciate the opportunity @allella !

[allella]

The speaking schedule is now on Meetup.

We'll announce it in some places tomorrow.

[allella]

Speakers,

In preparation for next week, here are presenter-related questions and notes. Please reply to the questions and let us know if you have any other concerns.

• Please come with proper video adapters to connect your laptop via HDMI if you're planning to use a TV
• @avon61002 and @gavincoyle your talks will be in our round table area and have access to the wall mounted TV with HDMI input
• @bogdankharchenko @ChristinaDRoberts @sirbeep @chruck @pamelawoodbrowne @allella will be in either of the two conference rooms as indicated on the schedule. The conference rooms will have only a rolling TV with HDMI input cables and one rolling seating-height table, unless you request otherwise (see below)
• Wi-Fi is SSID: nextonmain and Passphrase: Next@nMain300 This is a 10 Mpbs / 10 Mbps fiber connection. If you need a faster connection, then reach out to me / Jim in advance
• The event starts at 6 PM. There will be time to setup before your talk starts, but it's always good to test the internet and A/V connections, so it would be wise to arrive early to verify things will work. Volunteers will be there as early as 4:30 PM, so feel free to come between 4:30 and 6 PM
• Please let us know if you have any needs related to the following:
  • Any audio / video needs in addition to the aforementioned TVs
  • Use of power cords and outlets
  • Whiteboards & markers
  • Podium / lectern (table top)
  • Audio speakers
  • Projector
  • Time clocks (we don't have these, but could setup the timer on a phone, or something similar, if you don't have your own solution)
  • Holler if there's anything else that the host space (OpenWorks) would need to provide, or need to know?
• Please expect that attendees may come and go during the talks. We will try to keep any socializing during the talks far enough away to avoid disruption
• Please see OpenWorks' notes on parking and how to enter the building through the City's Richardson Street Parking Garage
• Volunteers (@oliviasculley and @jhloman ) will be doing a basic tri-pod video recording of the talks.
  • If you would prefer your talk not be recorded and/or posted online, then please let me / Jim know
  • We will likely post these on a HackGreenville channel (yet to be setup) and see if people engage with the video before considering more advanced production. If you think more advanced recording and post-production work is something future speakers might like as an optional / paid upgrade, then feel free to drop your thoughts on the video thread.
• Volunteer Alan Johnson @nalanj will be taking photos on an iPhone. If you want him to get your "good side", then connect with Alan about any photo-related requests.

[allella]

Two other notes.

1) If you haven't already, please RSVP for the event on Meetup. 2) If you would like to work out of OpenWorks the day of the event, then please reach out to Jim or Pam for more info.

[sirbeep]

"If you would like to work out of OpenWorks the day of the event, then please reach out to Jim or Pam for more info." hey, that's a good idea. I should come early to make sure my pot is hot.

[allella]

Presenters,

We have over 80 guests registered. With no-shows and walk-ins we'll probably come in somewhere between 65-75 people

To make more room for the Breakout talks, we're going to expand "Room 2" to include both conference rooms by opening up the middle divider wall.

As a result, "Room 1" of the breakouts, which will be @bogdankharchenko @ChristinaDRoberts and me, will use the round table and kitchen area and TV, which is where the single track talks will occur earlier in the schedule.

We'll have a dedicated "Social Lounge" inside OpenWorks for those who choose to socialize during any portion of the talking session, which we expect to help isolate the sound.