New York was the first place I visited for a conference, and it feels so good to come back here again after 6 long years. Yeah, I am older now, which is actually better because I feel more confident in myself. Also, knowing that my old conference buddies are going to be around helps reduce the fear and anxiety of being a speaker.
This year was my first time giving a tutorial and I was super excited for it because it’s a project that I really enjoyed working on: Synthoor and the idea was to introduce attendees to synthesizers as a way to learn the intersection of audio signal processing, music and Python.
The tutorial went really nice and the people were so cool, I met this really cool pastor from Pittsburgh who had made around 10 pieces of a 3d printed circle of fifths thingy that I thought was so nice!!! Met a lot of older people who are super interested and it such a learning experience helping them around with Python and also learning from them about a lot of interesting things, One guy told me that the sound we made using my FM synthesis algorithm sounds like a telephone ring cause that is literally how they used to transmit messages back then!!
We had people come in and make cool and interesting sounds with what we build and go to places I never did with this project, For example I was asked if we can build and Envelope on top of another Envelope to create a sort of trapezoidal shape for the wave and we DID!! live during the tutorial.
I met tons of EuroPython friends, made new friends in the tutorial and while roaming around the hallways! I did not get to attend a ton of talks cause I prioritized socializing so I ended up bookmarking a ton of them for when the videos come out, Although I did not miss the lightning talks cause they are always a lot of fun in person! I particularly loved Peter Sobot’s talk on “how to give keep your audience off their phones” It was quite illuminating to say the least lol and I got a live demo of why it works.
I went home with a lot of swag and stickers for myself, my friends and family :)
Before Pittsburg I spent some time in NYC, I watched Nils Frahm live!! I attended a livecode.nyc meetup, met livecoding friends there and then later got to attend an Algorave! The community in NYC was so inspiring.
Later I went to my friends place in San Jose, we drove out to Big Sur and had a blast of a road trip, we also spent a whole day picnicking at the Golden Gate Park which was huge and so beautiful!
Thanks for the good times once again and I shall see you soon America!