I think the last technical conference I attended was FOSDEM last year, and now I’m sat in the lobby of the Royal Library of Brussels working on a project that I want to take to some folks at this year’s FOSDEM, and checking the mailing lists of some projects I’m interested in to find meetups and relevant talks.
It’s been even longer since I spoke at a conference, I believe it would have been App Builders in 2016. When I left Facebook in 2015 with the view of taking a year out of software, I also ended up taking myself out of community membership and interaction. I felt like I didn’t know who I was, and wasn’t about to find out by continually defining myself in terms of other people.
I would have spoken at dotSwift in 2016, but personal life issues probably also related to not knowing who I was stopped me from doing that. In April, I went to Zurich and gave what would be my last talk as a programmer to anyone except immediate colleagues for over 18 months.
In the meantime, I explored bits of the software world outside of my immediate experience. I worked on a Qt app in high-performance computing, and I’m working on “full-stack” Javascript now.
[Full-stack Javascript is, of course, a lie, but I’d rather it keeps its current meaning as “the application bit of the stack in Javascript” than took a more correct sense.]
During this time, I found that I don’t mind so much what I’m working on: I have positive and negative opinions of all of it. I have lots of strong opinions, and lots of syntheses of other ideas, and need to be a member of a community that can share and critique these opinions, and extend and develop these syntheses.
Which is why, after a bit of social wilderness, I’m reflecting on this week’s first conference and planning my approach to the second.
