A few days ago, I went to the We are developers congress in Vienna, Austria. The “Woodstock for developers” actually turned out to be a very well organized, but less wild event full of pretty amazing presenters and content. It was a developer conference, not as focused about all kind of web matters, but more holistically about development. Hence a lot of the topic revolved around DevOps, high level languages, Artificial Intelligence and Cloud matters.

My personal contributions were:

A two hour “workshop” on building intelligent, human interfaces using machine learning systems. You can look up the notes and links of this workshop. For bonus points, I got confused about the date of this workshop. As I just returned from Seattle there was a time-difference confusion and I arrived an hour before the workshop. I hadn’t slept for 30 hours and arrived 20 minutes late for it. However, people seemed to have enjoyed it and I got good feedback.

‚AI has no morals and ethics, but used wrongly - it can amplify our biases‘ @codepo8 @WeAreDevs #MSFTxWAD #WADWorkshops #WeAreDevelopers pic.twitter.com/8utA6Ow1kT

— bernadette welly (@dettewell) May 16, 2018

On the second day I gave one of the opening talks (“Killing the golden calf of coding”) and it was incredibly scary to be on a huge stage like that, were earlier Steve Wozniak worked his magic. The slides of the talk are on SlideShare:

Feedback was phenomenal:

@codepo8 just said “there is no truth in: we will fix it later, let’s just finish the sprint”, and I couldn’t agree more with this quote #WeAreDevs pic.twitter.com/beTkAHh4sS

— Jeremias Menichelli (@jeremenichelli) May 17, 2018

@codepo8 talking about how coding is perceived and it’s future @WeAreDevs #loveenthusiasm #microsoft #vienna #WeAreDevs pic.twitter.com/BjhiUOjvLo

— Tereza Iofciu (she/her) @terezaif ? (@terezaif) May 17, 2018

"2018 ist ein guter Zeitpunkt, um zu erkennen, dass die Verwendung von CLI nicht mehr unsere Aufmerksamkeit erfordern sollte" – @codepo8 in "Sacrificing The Golden Calf of Coding" @WeAreDevs #WeAreDevs #Coding #CLI #Development pic.twitter.com/I16etlBzJz

— mediaman GmbH (@mediamanDE) May 17, 2018

I also took part in an Artificial Intelligence panel talking about the ethics and boundaries of AI.

A pitfall of #artificialintelligence #ai and #machinelearning? "It's not yet democratized, we don't yet have the social progress and means to distribute the huge advantages." @codepo8's words to that effect @WeAreDevs #WeAreDevs #WeAreDevelopers2018 pic.twitter.com/oACK1yNv5w

— Martin Schimak ? (@martinschimak) May 17, 2018

On the third day I was the MC on the main stage, introducing and running the Q&A for Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopulous, Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas, Google Angular expert Stephen Fluin, Futurist Martin Wezowski, Google iOS security expert Felix Krause, styled components inventor Max Stoiber and Stackoverflow/Fog Creek founder Joel Spolsky.

All in all, it was a very well organized event and it was great to meet some of my heroes (John and Brenda Romero of Wolfenstein/Doom fame) and many new ones.

I want to thank the organisers for having me and trusting me with so many things. I’m only sorry that I was pretty much shattered all the way as I had just come back from a few daunting days in Seattle the day before. I will come back to the event, as it is exciting and different at the same time.

My handwriting sucks and I am hardly capable of painting a straight line. Hence, when I got my Surface I didn’t see much use for the pen other than signing things and maybe highlighting some things in presentations.

However, I now found out that you can use the pen as a PowerPoint remote, which is pretty cool:

https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/995067123310325760

The trick is to buy (or in my case get a free key to) KeyPenX which is a $5.99 program that allows you granular access to what clicking the button of the pen should do.

It took me a while to get it to work, but here are the important bits:

Pair your pen via Bluetooth – you do that in the settings by “add device”. My pen didn’t show up at first, so I pressed the button for 10 seconds for it to reset; then it showed up.

Go to the pen settings and tell it to start KeyPenX on click and double click.

Configure KeyPenX to do the PowerPoint things you want it to do:

All of these steps are also in the KeyPenX screen itself. The only thing remaining is not to start clicking the pen all the time like I do with normal ones.