!!Con West 2019
who it's for
game developers, graphics programmers, embedded developers, systems programmers, database developers, security engineers, observability engineers
topics
IMU-based gesture recognition; racing-the-beam ray tracer on FPGA; triangle rasterization for rendering; branchless code optimization; fractal generation with SQL; Postgres playing Pokémon; minimax search algorithms; control theory for robotics; DNS operational failure modes; ransomware attack analysis; observability with open source tools; web accessibility technique (600-year-old trick)
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| The Best Parts! Of My Favorite Things! | Lynn Cyrin | 35m |
Lists concrete judgments not platitudes: walk the Git history to time‑travel commits back to 2010 and inspect decisions, prefer semantic version patterns — get… | ||
| IMUs FTW!! Building IMU-based gesture recognition! | Jennifer Wang | 10m |
Gesture recognition works end to end: an Adafruit IMU (accelerometer gyroscope magnetometer) streams time series that a sliding‑window classifier watches in a… | ||
| EarthBound’s almost-Turing-complete text system! | Alex Rasmussen | 11m |
EarthBound (1994) hides an embedded text interpreter with a three-register interpreter (4‑byte working, 2‑byte counter, active/storage sets), an instruction… | ||
| /etc/services is made of people! (and also ports!) | Breanne Boland | 10m |
The talk shows that /etc/services stores service names plus authors, email addresses, and dates and that IANA maintains the canonical list; examples include… | ||
| How do you tell folks what’s going on from a plane w/no engine?! | Tobias Bieniek | 09m |
Gliders travel hundreds of miles on rising air and FLARM beacons provide local positions; a ground system links FLARM/OGN feeds to the web. The project… | ||
| “Wheels within whiles!” or possibly “Whiles within wheels!” | Michael Albaugh | 11m |
Built a multi-layer stack that spans 150 years of digital computing tech, running a modern laptop through five layers of emulation down to Babbage’s Difference… | ||
| Let’s translate old video games! How do they even work?! | Misty de Méo | 10m |
Translating the Lunar series reveals concrete tactics not vague promises: text search uses bgrep to find Shift JIS byte sequences, several games use a fixed… | ||
| if … then … else had to be invented! | Erica Fischer | 10m |
Traces the claim that the familiar if then else is an invention: conditionals start as wired decisions on ENIAC 1946, evolve into 1949 conditional jumps and… | ||
| Keeping abandoned watches ticking! | Katharine Berry | 11m |
Community reverse engineers Pebble apps, mirrors sites, and reimplements APIs so watches keep booting after Fitbit shuts the original services. CloudPebble… | ||
| Everything the light touches is a triangle: how computers draw! | Molly Lloyd | 13m |
Claim: almost every visible pixel comes from triangles because modern GPUs and rasterization pipelines are optimized for them. Evidence: map rendering work at… | ||
| Fast code! By removing all branches! | Jeroen (Jerry) Van Leeuwen | 11m |
A migration of Delphi serialization to .NET 2.0 uses run-time code generation and heavy use of delegates and factory-created processors that do all type and… | ||
| Making blackout poetry with computers! | Max Kreminski | 11m |
A working generator turns any web page into multiple blackout-poetry readings by POS tagging with POS.js and running pattern matchers; a downloadable browser… | ||
| Generating fractals … with SQL queries!!! | Michael Malis | 12m |
Claim: Postgres SQL alone generates real fractals — Sierpinski, Mandelbrot, Julia, Hilbert and dragon — as text art. It uses generate_series and cross join to… | ||
| That’s hot! | Ori Bernstein | 12m |
Smart microwave claims: steer standing waves with a board of paddle antennas to cook two items to different targets (salmon aimed 65–70°C), replay previously… | ||
| This 1 simple 600-year-old trick makes your website more accessible! | Nick Piesco | 11m |
Claims that the medieval rule of tincture (no metal on metal, no color on color) directly maps to modern WCAG contrast targets, quantified by measured contrast… | ||
| How DNS doesn’t work! | Arshia Mufti | 12m |
DNS often appears to work but quietly fails: the system relies on 13 root servers historically and widespread anycast redundancy plus heavy caching (examples… | ||
| Glitch Nuggets of Resistance! | VJ Um Amel | 47m |
Argument: glitch functions as a tactical lens that exposes infrastructure and enables resistance rather than a mere aesthetic. Evidence: an Arabic archive… | ||
| Guiding a starship with noise! And blinking! | Simon Porter | 15m |
(486958) 2014 MU69 navigation combines noisy Hubble detections at magnitude 27 — roughly 150 detected photons per exposure — with a forward model and kernel… | ||
| The secret life of Not-a-Number! | Annie Cherkaev | 11m |
Explains that IEEE doubles leave a 51-bit NaN payload that gets reused to encode runtime values so the engine avoids extra words and register pressure. Shows… | ||
| Hacking Lego! Computer generated Lego instructions! | Michael Knowles | 09m |
Tool takes a 3D object or scan and converts 3D scan into step-by-step Lego instructions, emitting Lego CAD files that use part numbers like 3005 and 3024… | ||
| World’s 1st racing-the-beam ray tracer on discarded FPGA hardware!!! | Tom Verbeure | 11m |
A scanline ray tracer runs on discarded Pano Logic G1 hardware bought in bulk on eBay, using a racing the beam approach so no frame buffer or DRAM is required… | ||
| Robots, rockets, and more! Control theory in 10 minutes! | Wesley Aptekar-Cassels | 10m |
Live coding builds a simulated elevator and tries controllers that actually run: bang-bang control flips a force back and forth and oscillates, proportional… | ||
| Minimax search and the structure of cognition! | Zack M. Davis | 08m |
Built a simple chess engine and runs a minimax search to a fixed depth using a piece count evaluation, then inspects what that brute force planner actually… | ||
| Postgres plays Pokémon! | Liz Frost | 11m |
A Postgres foreign-data-wrapper written in Rust Postgres extension exposes Pokémon Red’s in-emulator memory as tables so SQL queries read and write actual game… | ||
| Software patterns … from the 9th century?!! | Michael Arntzenius | 10m |
Claim: changing fallow from half to a third yields 33% more food but deployment requires crop shifts to nitrogen‑fixing legumes, new tools like a heavier plow… | ||
| How to Throw Out 95% of Pixels in VR, Without Anyone Noticing!! | Amrita Mazumdar | 09m |
Claims a concrete system that discards 95% pixels by keeping only the fovea at full detail and degrading periphery with foveated rendering. Implementation uses… | ||
| How to calculate the phase of the moon very, very badly! | Andre Arko | 12m |
A lunar calendar app called Luna initially uses 27.321661 days (sidereal month) and drifts three days over 18 months; swapping in the average 29.530587981 days… | ||
| Value Your Types! | Eric Weinstein | 10m |
Types encode concrete properties now: dependent types express “non‑negative” or “length‑N” constraints, shown with Idris vectors where the type carries the… | ||
| The Conjuring: ransomware edition!! | Pranshu Bajpai | 14m |
Shows concrete procedures not fluff: demonstrates a PHP server strain with weak repeatable key derivation that lets an analyst reproduce the per-victim… | ||
| Observability in the Kitchen: Improve Your Breadmaking Skills w/OSS!! | Daisy Tsang | 11m |
Uses Raspberry Pis with Bosch BME280 sensors, a custom Prometheus exporter and Grafana dashboards to record temperature and humidity of separate sourdough… | ||
| Computers are fast! But how come they sometimes feel slow? | M. Lazer-Walker | 12m |
Computers get faster but moment-to-moment responsiveness still lags because multiple delays stack: human visual reaction (~180–250 ms for simple tasks), input… | ||
| My, my, TTY! | Tabitha Sable | 11m |
Claims that the TTY abstraction is ancient yet still drives modern shells, demonstrated with concrete milestones: PDP-7 UNIX is built in 1969 and works… | ||
| nothing matches | ||