The JezUK Winter/Spring Tour wraps up on Thursday 30 May at the BrumPHP Meetup. It’ll be the last outing of The Very Slow Time Machine, my talk about the Archangel project. I’m part of a double bill with David Maidment who’s talking about writing an old fashioned game engine in Go. That sounds like really good fun.

I presented this session at this year’s ACCU Conference. It’s always a good programme, but this year’s was just ridiculous, so it was a really privilege to be accepted. I’m reasonably comfortable giving a session, but I was scheduled in one of the larger rooms for the first time. You’re presenting from a stage in front of a massive screen, the room lights are down and there are spotlights in your eyes. I did find it a bit daunting. I tend to walk about and wave my arms around while I’m presenting, and I was more than a little worried I’d fall off the stage. (This was so apparent to one of my 'friends' they told me afterwards they had their phone primed and ready to capture the moment if I did.) I also cocked my timing up rather.

The talk is in two chunks. The first half is a pretty straight ahead description of the technology of cryptocurrencies. The second half looks at what a disaster cryptocurrencies and blockchains are in practice. I honestly tried to keep to time, but as I wrote new examples just kept coming up. I ended up referring to a series of events that had all happened within the past 10 days, some as recently as the day before. (If I’d been scheduled on the last day of the conference instead of the first, they would have been overtaken by an entirely new set of events.) I probably should have reigned that in a little, as I ended up skipping over some bits and dropping the small positive note I’d promised. Nonetheless, I enjoyed doing it and it seemed to go down well. And the rest of the conference was just great.

DVD Extras

I was the guest of Brum.js last week giving the latest rendition of The Very Slow Time Machine, my talk about the Archangel project. Brum.js promises we meet monthly to talk about JavaScript and were very gracious in not complaining that I didn’t mention JavaScript at all. It was a really enjoyable evening, and it was good to be able to put some faces to names, catch up with some old colleagues, and meet some new people. I would have liked to stay longer than I did, but I had a four hour drive back to the JezUK West Wales Live/WorkSpace ahead of me so sadly wasn’t able to.

Archangel is about to run a little pilot scheme with a number of archives around the world, so hopefully I’ll have something extra to say in May when this talk gets its last outing.

DVD Extras