A Tale of Two Talks

My day-to-day contribution to Free Software has changed quite dramatically in the last couple of  years. I'm no-longer as involved with any one project than I used to be. Somewhat correlated with my declining active contribution to Free Software projects is my decline in public speaking.

You wait forever for a bus and then two come along at the same time!

I shall be delivering two very different talks in the coming months: one in which I will remind the audience that PacMan is a real asshole and in the other I will talking about documentation communities within Free Software.

"PacMan: The Original Troll", Ignite Berlin

Thursday, July 30th at 19:00. IXDS studio, Paul-Lincke-Ufer 39/40, 10999 Berlin

"PacMan: The Original Troll. PacMan is one of the best-known, well-loved and often-copied games of all time. But PacMan is mocking you. You cannot beat PacMan; nobody can beat PacMan. He laughs in your face."

I recently attended Enthusiasticon where one of the talks was about Pokémon and, more specifically, about how a programming error (almost certainly caused by an engineer wrestling with the GameBoy's very limited architecture) made the game bizarrely winnable. If you knew how. This inspired to get up and talk about PacMan; a game which has the opposite problem.

As an Ignite talk, I will only have 5 minutes. PacMan needs no introduction, so I can save some time there. So I will cut straight to the ghosts, the map and why you're doomed to never beat PacMan.

Spoiler alert: the "waka waka" noise that PacMan makes... that's him laughing in your face.

More of the event details can be found at the Ignite Berlin website.

"Judas Priest Ate My ScrumMaster", Write The Docs Europe

Monday, August 31st and Tuesday, September 1st at 09:00. Club Lavka, Novotného lávka 201/1, 110 00 Prague

"Community Management in Free Software communities is still an emerging field and has produced a spectrum of practitioners: from master-manipulators of social media, to those more focused on metrics and data as a means to driving process. Either way, the state of the art is still largely driven by the needs of technical contributors to projects. Good documentation is a crucial component in a software product and yet often technical writers are overlooked as important stakeholders of the process. Within the community, there are undoubtedly common problems between engineers and technical writers. Software Engineering is full of laws; can we show that these laws apply to technical writers as a means to help bridge the chasm between developers and technical writers?? In this talk Paul walks us through a selection of his favourite laws of software engineering and explores how developers measure them and if technical writers must also obey them. Or not. And what that means for the success of documentation in a Free Software project."

This will be the second time that I have spoken at a Write The Docs event. These are very friendly events and very welcoming given my "deliberate outsider" position. As a software engineer I think it is fun and useful to engage with events like Write The Docs in order to reach and say "here is how I think document writers and engineers can work together better" from the engineering perspective.

In this particular talk I will be exploring some of the rules and laws of software engineering and showing how I think these laws equally apply to document creation. Do these common problems create a bridge between document creation and coding? A common "platform" to work from?

Spoiler alert: 90% of this talk will be crap.

More of the event details can be found at the Write The Docs Europe website.