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Topconf Talinn 2017

I’m currently in Talinn where I’m taking part in Topconf Talinn 2017. After a day of travelling and looking around in the city my talk was scheduled in the morning of the first day.

I presented my blockchain talk which I had slightly modified to fit it in the time slot of 40 minutes. This forced me to remove some parts but still it was difficult to get it done in the allotted time. Luckily I took part in the open space lab in the afternoon where a couple of attendees approached me to learn more about the subject. My talk currently has a rating of 4.6/5.

Slides can be downloaded here and the source of my Ethereum game is available on GitHub.

I haven’t applied this talk to any future conferences, so for now this is the last time I gave it. A recording of my session at NDC Oslo 2017 is also available on YouTube.

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Topconf Duesseldorf 2017

Last week I was fortunate enough to be part of Topconf Duesseldorf. It was the first time the conference was organized in Duesseldorf. My talk on blockchain technology and more specific on Bitcoin and Ethereum had been selected and together with 46 other speakers we would fill two days packed with sessions.

I had changed the abstract a little bit after reviewing the feedback from NDC and also removed parts of the presentation to fit it in 40 minutes. In the end though I did go over time, and with only 10 minutes between sessions I had to rush through the last part. Lessons learned for next month when I will be giving this talk at Topconf Talinn.

There were a lot of questions during and after the talk so the audience was quite engaged, in fact the atmosphere of the entire conference was very amicable. The reviews which have been submitted for my session also reflect my own thoughts on how it went. At the time of writing this post my session got an average score of 4.29 / 5. The slides can be downloaded here and the code of the DApp is available on GitHub. I’ve now written the game 3 times and it was also the first time I felt confident enough to let the attendees participate.

In the audience was also Joy Clarck who made a great summary.

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NDC Oslo 2017

I was very fortunate to be selected as one of the speakers for this year’s NDC conference. Together with my colleague and friend Hans we delivered our blockchain talk. It was based on the talk we gave at Cloudbrew in December although the structure and the code have undergone a lot of changes.

The idea of the talk hasn’t changed though. We dived straight into technology and explained how Bitcoin provides the security it needs to make sure transactions are safe. We then zoomed out and illustrated how blockchain technology can be used for much more than just the financial world and proved that with our own DApp or distributed application running on Ethereum.

The slides can be downloaded here and the sample code is up at GitHub. The app is still a work in progress. It might be unrelated but there’s currently a spike in Ethereum transactions :).

Today we received the scores of the talk. Of those that placed a card in the box: 60 were green, 23 were yellow and 5 were red. So overall 70% liked it. I do wonder what the yellow people wanted to see or what they didn’t like.

We tried to put in the 60 minutes all the things we would love to hear in a talk. There were a lot of questions during and after the session so I think we achieved what we set out to do and thats to inspire people to look at blockchain technology. It’s no silver bullet but might be a perfect fit for some projects.

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CloudBrew: The blockchain and you

Last Saturday I presented at CloudBrew. In 2015 my talk focused on doing IoT in your own home. This year it was time for something completely different.

The past months I’ve been looking at blockchain technology and together with my colleague Hans we introduced the audience in this new world. Since it was a technical conference we explained how the basic principles are implemented and gave a demo of our own little distributed application.

You can get the slides here and the demo code is located in my GitHub account. Over the past months I plan to write down what I’ve learned so far and will also improve the sample application.