This was the inaugural year of CommunityDays KC. The conference was connecting multiple different technical communities / meetups across Kansas City in a two-day event. It was hosted at Lifted Logic’s office space, which was a neat location - had a larger community room on the lower level, with several rooms for different sessions. Adam Fichman, the founder of Lifted Logic, kicked off the event with a quick talk on his background and the analysis on the value of a customer in relation to the costs of acquiring them. I noticed he has done a TEDx talk before, which hits on some of the similar elements on the value of a customer and analysis on getting conversion for site visitors. It was neat to have that perspective shared at the beginning of the event, especially hearing from a tech entrepreneur in Kansas City.
What I enjoy most about these conferences is connecting with people. Often, I get to see people I haven’t seen in a while - either since a past conference or a previous team I had worked with. In that same time of reconnecting with past colleagues, you occasionally get to meet their newer team members, learn what they are facing, and what they are doing to address it. It’s a fun way to quickly reconnect and grow your connections.
Notes#
When listening to talks, I often try to take notes to help me keep focus on what are the key items being shared. I do this intentionally with handwritten style notes, as I can emphasize things quicker with visualizations that assist with my memory. These notes can sometimes be quite hard to read, but I have found myself going back to them when recalling a topic that I know was from a conference. Here are some of my notes I took which were more than just a few scribbles. Maybe they will help you learn something too!
My Talk#
I was also a speaker for two talks at the conference, here are the links to the slides:
- A Practical Guide to JVM Native Memory in Kubernetes: A quick talk (15 minutes) on how to understand and measure the native memory usage of your Java workloads running on Kubernetes (there is money to be saved on your cloud provider bills).
- What HTTP Can Teach Us About Better Human Communication: This is a 5 minute lightening talk, that is 20 slides, that automatically advances every 15 seconds. These can be a challenging presentation format, but they are always fun to do!
