2024 Lightning Talks MC Script
EVENT INTRO
MEG:
Welcome everyone to the 2024 Virtual Coffee Lightning Talks! We're your hosts Meg and Bekah, and we're so excited to be here with you today! We're going to take a minute to tell you a bit about the Virtual Coffee community while people are tuning in and getting settled. But first, hi mom!
BEKAH:
Virtual Coffee started as a once a week Zoom chat in April of 2020, and has grown into a community of devs at all stages of the journey, meeting, mentoring, hosting events, and most importantly, making friends. Our mission is to be a welcoming tech community that allows room for growth and mentorship at all levels, and to create meaningful opportunities for learning, leadership, and contribution for everyone. To find our code of conduct, events, or to learn more, you can check out our website virtualcoffee.io.
MEG:
We're about to wrap up our Find Your Voice monthly challenge, which was all about public speaking. In May, we're going to focus on one of my favorite monthly challenges: Community Kindness. This challenge encourages our members to celebrate one of the things that continually makes the Virtual Coffee community so special: Kindness.
We're so glad to have you all here with us today, and I especially want to thank our speakers for embracing the monthly challenge and signing up to give a talk. Without you, this event wouldn't be possible!
BEKAH:
Lightning Talks are meant to be an introduction to a topic. Here at Virtual Coffee we treat them as a good way to ease into public speaking or gauge interest for a possible Lunch & Learn topic, so today we won't be taking questions as part of the event. Instead, we'll be tagging the speaker and their topic in the #vc-events channel in Slack directly after their talk, so please feel free to add questions, comments, or general positivity there. We definitely still want to encourage usage of the livestream chat too, especially when speakers ask the audience questions!
MEG:
Are you ready to kick this off, Bekah? I'm very excited about this first talk.
SPEAKER: BEKAH
Talk Title: The Virtual Coffee Effect
Bekah graduated from a coding bootcamp in May of 2019 and since then has spent time as a frontend developer, started the Virtual Coffee developer community, spent time in DevRel and has continued to mom her four kids. She currently co-hosts the Virtual Coffee podcast, works as the Developer Experience Lead at OpenSauced, tries to work on OSS projects, and lifts heavy things in her free time.
SPEAKER: JÖRN
Talk Title: Decentralization with WebRTC
Jörn started developing web-based software in the last century when he was still in school. In 2018, he founded his second company compose.us where they build user-friendly web applications for clients and products like Flottform.io. In his spare time Jörn organizes local meetups in Germany and creates at least one open source commit per day to push his side projects.
SPEAKER: ABDURRAHMAN
Talk Title: How to Become 10x Engineer through Open Source
Abdurrahman is a software engineer who contributes to open source and loves volunteering with NGOs. He has worked in the industry as a web engineer and DevRel engineer. He loves learning new technologies, sharing his knowledge with others and disadvantaged people (refugees, orphans, etc.), and empowering others through workshops and events. He is the host of the hadithtech.com podcast, where he talks with people about their tech experience and shares his experience on YouTube as well.
SPEAKER: EDDIE
Talk Title: Collaborative CSSBattles
Eddie is a backend developer with a passion for connecting people and things. He is interested in interactive and collaborative programming experiences. He enjoys expressing his creativity through programming side projects that illuminate and make opaque things translucent. He particularly likes programming in Python. In his free time, he likes playing pickleball and catching a frisbee at the beach.
SPEAKER: JAMES
James, you've spent over 35 years as a programmer. How many programming languages do you think you've worked with by now?
Talk Title: Becoming a Keyboard Power User
James has spent 35+ years as a developer programming in Assembly, C, C++, and C# (in that order) with sidelines in ASP/VBScript, ASP.Net, JavaScript, Perl, VisualBasic, plus a few others which he's not going to mention 'cuz if he did someone might ask him to use them again. (Shudder!) He's also a Licensed Massage Therapist (NJ), an award-winning theater impresario, a gallery-exhibited photographer, and a published playwright. Yeah, that's right. He's a Renaissance man!
INTERMISSION
MEG:
Thanks, James! I'm gonna go ahead and throw my mouse away now. Don't need it anymore!
Wow, five talks in and they've all been so full of interesting concepts and useful information!
BEKAH:
Yeah, for sure. With that last talk, we've hit the halfway mark in our Lightning Talks event. We're going to go ahead and take a quick 10 minute intermission, then meet you back here. Make sure you get up out of your seat, stretch out your arms and legs, and go get a glass of water, then meet us back here in 10 minutes. Startiiiinnnggg NOW!
MEG:
I feel refreshed, how about you?
Before we dive back into it, I want to thank a few behind-the-scenes people who helped make this event today possible: Andy and Rafi for acting as mentors to our speakers, Lex for helping to moderate chat, Shelley for collecting info from speakers, Dan for setting up and testing the livestream, and Dan again plus Ryan who will work together to turn this giant recorded livestream into individual YouTube videos for people to watch at their leisure. You're all fantastic!
SPEAKER: AYU
Talk Title: Building Bridges, Not Walls: The Importance of Documentation in Open Source Projects
Ayu is an open source maintainer, contributor, technical blogger, and self-taught front-end developer based in The Netherlands. Her passion for lifelong learning and collaboration is what motivates her open source contributions, project collaboration, and community engagement. Learning new things fills her with excitement, and she's eager to share her learning in public and pass on her knowledge through her blog and Twitter.
SPEAKER: ANDY
It says in your speaker bio, "He'll eat a lot of sushi if you let him." Has anyone ever not let you? SCRAM! You're eating WAY TOO MUCH SUSHI!
Talk Title: OTel Me a Story: Observing Code in Production
Andy is a father of 3 and husband of 1. He's the Director of Engineering at Ninjacat, a marketing and advertising data company. He's written bugs in nearly every programming language and likes data, devops-related ideas and all things software. He'll eat a lot of sushi if you let him.
SPEAKER: NICK
Talk Title: Demystifying TypeScript Generics
Nick Taylor is a Senior Software Engineer at OpenSauced. He is a big fan of Open Source and has a growing interest in serverless and edge computing.
SPEAKER: AGI
Talk Title: Growth Mindset in Software Engineering
Agi is a full stack software engineer who took a non-linear path into technology. She attended Northeastern University for finance and marketing and started her professional journey at a Fortune 100 company before pivoting into the world of start-ups filling a variety of roles. Agi attended Flatiron School in 2020 to begin her journey in software and currently works in ad tech. She is passionate about diversity in the tech industry, participating in company DEI initiatives and holding a leadership role within the Out In Tech organization. She lives in Oakland, CA with her wife, toddler and Maltipoo.
SPEAKER: DAN
Hey, Dan! I heard you have a flavorful presentation to close us out. What's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Talk Title: Level Up Your GitHub Markdown Game
Dan Ott is a full-stack developer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Currently serving as the Lead Developer at Sprokets, a strategic design and development firm, Dan brings over 15 years of joyful experience in JavaScript and front-end development and design. He also contributes as an Org Maintainer at Virtual Coffee. In his spare time he enjoys spending time with his two boys, playing disc golf, and woodworking.
OUTRO
BEKAH:
Thanks, Dan! I didn't know markdown had flavors! What a fun way to end our event.
Thank you all for being here today, especially our speakers. We look forward to keeping this discussion going in Slack. Check out the #vc-events channel or hop into the #co-working-room channel to discuss some of the talks you just watched.
And as a reminder, we're starting our Community Kindness monthly challenge in a few days. It's a fun one full of warm and fuzzies!
MEG:
As always if you have questions or comments, please feel free to reach out. We're always here to support you and to answer any question. You can ping us in Slack, on Twitter @VirtualCoffeeIO or email us at hello@virtualcoffee.io.
Have a great day, everyone!