Last week, I've had the priviledge of being asked to speak at the "last FrenchKit", (don't worry, it's just getting rebranded), among very knowledgeable and smart people.
My talk? 75 minutes on the joy of looking at code "that kinda works" and make it better, through debugging and optimization.
The gimmick was to use Greek philosopher quotes as the starting point for each segment, which was hilarious on paper, but wasn't that good in practice. Not that it bombed, but it didn't get many laughs. That's fine, you don't get yourself on stage if you can't take criticism.
The interesting part for me was finding my way back to "my people", the devs, the geeks, the people who get super enthusiastic about a random piece of code, or the future that tech holds for us.
Not that I dislike education, far from it. As people at the conference were probably sick of hearing, I find the challenge of hacking a humain brain immensely fascinating. 😁
But there is something to be said about being in a room with many people who look at code in a way that's not frightening, or "important for your grades", or purely as a moneymaker. People who can sit for 75 minutes watching a rando go through his own code in order to criticize it and highlight the many many ways it could be better.
