Using font shaping to put commas in big numbers EVERYWHERE!! by Tristan Hume My job involves a lot of staring at big numbers, like latencies in nanoseconds, and picking out larger magnitudes like microseconds. I got tired of counting digits in many different programs, so I decided to solve the problem in the most general way possible: with a font! OpenType font shaping allows fonts to provide all sorts of fancy rules for how they’re displayed. I’ll explain how I repurposed a feature designed for Arabic calligraphy in order to make a font that inserts fake commas between groups of three digits in large numbers everywhere! Tristan Hume works on fast software at Jane Street. He gets captivated by funny and cool technical ideas and develops a burning desire to implement them, mostly in Rust but sometimes in OpenType font shaping rules. He writes long technical articles about things he does and finds interesting at https://thume.ca/.

Obelisk and the Known Unknowns (Or: The Art of Fumbling Through your Side Project to Create Something Incredible!) by Sacha Sayan I had a dream of building something cool in the realm of digital signage, no fabrication knowledge, questionable memory of high school physics equations, and a terrible track record for finishing side projects. So I did what anyone else would do: Pulled my credit card out to buy a bunch of undocumented electronics from an internet wholesaler and forced myself to sit down and figure it out. The result: Something amazing, and a deep reflection for how we should think about our pet projects. When Sacha (@sachasayan) isn’t getting himself into trouble committing to side projects, he’s working as a software engineer in Toronto, Canada. In his spare time he also likes to get lost on motorcycles in far flung corners of the planet, demonstrating that he really is a masochist beyond redemption.

Let’s implement DNS to learn history! by Dylan Nugent The history of most internet protocols is captured in static and sometimes obtuse standards documents called RFCs. Reading all the necessary RFCs to understand a protocol might seem like a tedious chore…but it doesn’t have to be! RFCs give us a unique glance into what was (and wasn’t) on the minds of engineers decades ago when they were designing these protocols! If we study RFCs like archeologists might study artifacts, we can learn a lot! DNS, the system that translates domain names like ““google.com”” into routable addresses, is one of the oldest application protocols still in regular use! It’s defined across over 256 different RFCs, which sounds daunting, but we don’t need to look at them all! Let’s take a deep dive into a few of these RFCs and learn what we can by exploring some of DNS’s stranger quirks! Dylan is a programmer who just moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco. He’s currently recovering from being a manager by spending time at the Recurse Center, a self-directed retreat for programmers who want to learn about things (such as the minuta of networking protocols)! When he’s not building DNS servers for fun, he’s probably backpacking, singing karaoke, or both.

Screwing up is easier than ever before! by Joshua Wise When I was growing up, hardware was quite an expensive hobby. I got to play around some, but I never really got any good at building bigger circuits, because failure was so pricey – if I got something wrong, I had to get out all the etching chemicals again, so I didn’t try anything that I wasn’t absolutely certain of. I think of this all the time, because I feel so lucky that professional-grade manufacturing is much more affordable, and parts are much cheaper – so I can make mistakes to my heart’s content! I feel like the best ways I’ve learned – both when I’ve built hardware, and when I’ve written software – have been from screwing up, and getting pretty fast feedback as to what went wrong. In this talk, I’ll give you explicit permission to screw up, and I’ll give you some of my most educational moments of when I screwed up – and I’ll give you some pointers so you can start screwing up at home, too! Joshua blows up electronics less frequently, but not infrequently, when he does work for his clients (they would generally prefer him to blow up nothing at all). He is thankful that they, too, understand that blowing things up is an important part of the R&D process.

89 characters of base-11?! Mobile networking in rural Ethiopia! by Ben Kuhn Suppose you’re trying to build a client-server app that works in rural Ethiopia. Mobile data there doesn’t work most of the time! Of course, you’re not going to let that stop you… but how will you manage?! How many strange protocols will you need to abuse to make it work?? We’ll start our journey with a standard Android app using standard HTTP calls, and slowly descend into the abyss through a soup of acronyms including SSL, UDP, SMS, and even USSD. By the end, we’ll have encoded our entire network request into a string of less than 89 characters which are either digits or the letter N, and also understood why the heck we need to do that?! Ben works on helping unbanked people in Sub-Saharan Africa send and save money. When not bashing his head against obscure network protocols, he enjoys reading, climbing, hiking, making music, contra dancing, trying to improve the world, and various other strange activities. You can find him on the Internet at benkuhn.net.

*Punch Card Love! A (Very!) Personal History of Computer Dating! by Amy Cash I owe my existence to punch cards. When I tell people that my parents met on a computer date, they generally aren’t that surprised. This changes when I mention that the date was arranged in 1968. Where, when, and why did the computer dating industry begin? Who was invited to participate (and who was not)? What machines, languages, and algorithms were used? All these questions will be answered as we explore the social and technical aspects of the early days of using computation to find romance. In 1998, a friend of Amy’s told her she should get into computer programming; 19 years later she finally took him up on the idea. She is a 2017 graduate of Ada Developer’s Academy (Cohort 8!) and she currently develops software for biologists at the University of Washington.

EMAIL! by Char Stiles I am going to talk about EMAIL! Yes, email! Not to complain about email, but the good parts of email, like the cool stuff that we can do with it: maintain a git repo, display html, run your own email server, use a CLI inbox, and make art. For so many, it is the most used form of digital communication that only necessarily relies on a protocol, and not a company or institution. Email was born in the 70s and it’s not going anywhere! I will share my journey making my own mischievous email server, which aims to bring a spark back into email communication. I will also go over the protocol (this talk is still 10 min, the protocol is just that simple!). Hopefully at the end of this talk everyone can appreciate email a little more, and perhaps some will agree with me that email is totally metal. Char Stiles thinks about email protocol a lot, but spends all day practicing social protocol by writing and sending emails. Char is very much online with the handle @charstiles on many social media platforms, with a home page at www.charstiles.com.

The Making of a Mosquito.JS by Tim Holman The audio api’s are one of the most complex and wonderful parts of the browser, built to open up the entire web to audio creation. At some point though, we were so preoccupied with whether or not we could, we didn’t stop to think if we should… And as such, mosquito.js was born. This talk is about my descent into madness, as piece by piece I poured my energy into best possible recreation of the most dangerous, and annoying creatures on the entire planet. Learn some web audio basics, and some neat tips and tricks, and see how one person completely fell apart trying to perfect something that should never have existed in the first place. If you’re lucky, you can go a little insane too! Tim is an Australian developer with a love for all things weird on the web, if you don’t catch him hacking away at the worlds most useless code, he’ll be working hard on tools to get more people into generative art, and feeling empowered to create!