!!Con 2018
2018-05-12..2018-05-13
New York, NY, United States
!!Con ·
[!!Con 2016, !!Con 2017, !!Con 2018, !!Con 2019, !!Con 2020, !!Con 2021, !!Con 2024]
as the organisers put it
!!Con (pronounced "bang bang con") is two days of ten-minute talks, with lots of breaks of course, to celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing.
who it's for
creative programmers, web and media developers, developer experience engineers, programming language designers, hardware and radio hackers, data visualization engineers, educators and makers
topics
traceroute storytelling; missing map datasets; Arabic programming language; typed-holes code synthesis; PICO-8 token optimization; live REPL video mixing; static linking symbol bugs; satellite SDR reception; Library of Babel compression; SimCity orthographic reprojection; Pokemon state-to-regex construction; relativistic ray-tracing
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Keynote | Mimi Onuoha | 30m |
Claim: large, populated places routinely vanish from map and civic datasets — a floating-lake community of 100,000 people, parts of Chad’s basin housing ~2… | ||
| Telling stories with traceroute! | Karla Burnett | 11m |
Traceroute becomes a storytelling medium by abusing its mechanics: TTL expired spoofing makes routers appear as extra hops, reverse DNS hostnames turn IPs into… | ||
| Tales of ⌧! Can You Tell Your Story When Your Character Is Undefined?! | Persa Zula | 10m |
Shows how to detect missing characters by reading a font’s CMap table and checking whether a code point maps to a nonzero glyph id, using a small Ruby script… | ||
| Turning Google Earth into SimCity 2000! (From Light to Pixels to...) | Logan Williams | 10m |
Claim: real aerial footage can be turned into SimCity 2000–style views by reprojecting pixels rather than doing heavy vision. Method: change one line in Mapbox… | ||
| We built a map to aggregate real-time flood data in under two days! | Aruna Sankaranarayanan | 11m |
We built a map to aggregate real-time flood data in under two days! by Aruna Sankaranarayanan During the 2015 floods in Chennai, India, a few of us built an… | ||
| Collaborating with your computer using typed holes! | Vaibhav Sagar | 09m |
Demos show typed holes in Python, Haskell and Agda, with editor integration and a proof-search engine that synthesizes code from holes; a dependent-vector… | ||
| Compressing the Library of Babel! | David Turner | 09m |
Explains why a compressor cannot shrink the Library of Babel: using pigeonhole principle to show some books must expand, and using a tiny… | ||
| It’s super effective! Solving Pokemon Blue with a... | Alex Clemmer | 14m |
Claim is that a single, huge regular expression can accept if and only if a complete button sequence wins Pokemon Blue; construction uses the state‑removal… | ||
| Transform live video streams with code and a REPL!! | Mark Wunsch | 09m |
A live-coding video mixer exists and is demoed working: Overscan live-coding environment composes camera, screen, drawings and text into a Twitch broadcast in… | ||
| Creating an Arabic Programming Language! | Ahmed Abdalla | 11m |
Created an Arabic programming language called Noor, an imperative Algol-based language aimed at middle and high schoolers; a working browser editor exists but… | ||
| Evil Twins and the Secret Lives of Linkers! | Josh Bowman-Matthews | 10m |
A short C++ lab reproduces a surprising static-linking bug: adding an Evil Twins and the Secret Lives of Linkers! farewell library introduces duplicate inline… | ||
| Satellites are talking to us! Let’s hear them out! | Ed Medvedev | 13m |
Over 1,500 human-made satellites orbit Earth and many transmit signals that are decodable with a cheap SDR and a homemade antenna; the talk demonstrates an… | ||
| The joys of PICO-8 token crunching!! Or: what I learned... | Ayla Myers | 10m |
Concrete constraints drive every choice: PICO-8 enforces 8,192 tokens, a 128-sprite sheet and 64 sounds, so the talk shows specific hacks — mirror a symmetric… | ||
| UX for Cats and Dogs! | Joel Potischman | 10m |
Three cats and one dog send selfies from a home photo booth built on a Raspberry Pi with a camera, servo-driven treat feeder, Node 8 + Express, GPIO libraries… | ||
| If you could solve this word tile puzzle, you could solve the halting problem! (Too bad you can’t!) | Kamal Marhubi | 13m |
Claims the Post Correspondence Problem is undecidable by giving an explicit reduction from the halting problem: a routine turns any Turing machine into a set… | ||
| So THAT’S how my phone knows where I am! | Mike Lazer-Walker | 10m |
Phone location is traced to timestamps from spaceborne clocks and simple geometry not magic: devices compare satellite timestamps from about 24 satellites to… | ||
| Keynote: Build skills through hobbies! Bring them to work! | Liz Fong Jones | 32m |
Claims that Puzzle Pirates, World of Warcraft, EVE Online and Factorio produce concrete, transferable skills: mentoring and community building, incident… | ||
| Relativistic Software Calendars: It’s About Time! | John Feminella | 11m |
Claim: keeping clocks in sync becomes literally impossible once systems accelerate away from Earth because simultaneity and elapsed time change with velocity… | ||
| Undo all the things! | Tom Ballinger | 11m |
Shows that undo is implemented by replaying actions not magical GC, demonstrates bpython’s undo behavior and a Haskell prototype, and explains limits… | ||
| Estimating the Value of Pi with a Dartboard and (Not so Much) Luck! | Stephen Tu | 09m |
Uniform random throws over a square-inscribed circle yield an unbiased Monte Carlo estimate for pi given by 4·(inside)/n, implemented in two lines of NumPy and… | ||
| Talking to my past self (without introducing temporal paradoxes!) | Andrew Louis | 11m |
Claims a working pipeline that trains a seq2seq RNN in TensorFlow on archived chat logs, specifically an MSN-era bot and a modern Hangouts bot, using epochs of… | ||
| Four fake filesystems! | Omar Rizwan | 09m |
Four concrete demos: GrabFS exposes live window images so a one‑liner snapshots Safari every second; BTFS mounts a torrent and lazily fetches pieces so a 2 GB… | ||
| Using Postgres to \watch Star Wars! | Will Leinweber | 08m |
A complete pipeline loads Simon Jansen’s Episode IV 2 megabytes of ASCII frames into a table, parses groups of 14 lines per frame, stores them with an auto… | ||
| If at first you don’t succeed at beating HQ Trivia, try cheating! | Hung Truong | 10m |
Builds an iOS then Mac app that screenshots HQ Trivia, uses Apple’s Vision framework to find text and tesseract for OCR, then automates web searches via a… | ||
| The Man Comes Around: and so does his sound! | Vince Allen | 12m |
Uses topic modeling, spectrum analysis, acoustic vectors to label 16 early and 7 late gospel tracks and to cluster Johnny Cash’s catalog with “The Man Comes… | ||
| Ray-tracing and special relativity: Rendering objects near the speed of light! | Lucy Zhang | 12m |
A modified ray-tracer converts pixel rays to 4D, applies a Lorentz 4×4 transform to move into the object's frame, then intersects geometry and returns colors… | ||
| Whoa, pictures! A visual history of visual programming languages! | Emily Nakashima | 12m |
Claims that visuals change how people think are inspected against concrete systems: Sketchpad (1963), flowchart tools like GRAIL, Scratch (2002), dataflow… | ||
| Fast, but Not Too Fast! What 17th-Century Windmills Can Teach Us | Wander Hillen | 11m |
A short engineering talk describes a simple capacity-throttling control function (implemented in six lines of code) that paces background jobs using feedback… | ||
| The itty, bitty, tiny bytes that make up a Pokemon! | Jan Mitsuko Cash | 10m |
Claim: a full Pokémon fits in 232 bytes per Pokémon, and that density is why Japan flooded PokéBank overload and delayed its global launch. Walks through exact… | ||
| Pseudofractals! Accidental aesthetics where math meets pixels | Jes Wolfe | 09m |
A recurring glitch proves to be a concrete phenomenon: sampling limits create persistent aliasing artifacts from simple formulas, explained with the Nyquist… | ||
| How !!Con came to be... and its future! | Julia Evans | 20m |
Origin story and logistics: a conference born in 2013-14 from a joke that required a website and a CFP now reports nearly 300 proposals this year, pays for… | ||
| nothing matches | ||