Hosting the Lightning Talks at DevCon 2022

This blog post is 3 months late! Life happened.

It was a lot of preparation leading up to the Developers Conference 2022. I had 3 talks lined up for this conference:

Vite
Vue3 (I requested to cancel this one)
Organizing/hosting the Lightning Talks

Although it's nowhere near the amount of work involved in organizing a conference, it's certainly more eventful than speaking for one session. I've always considered the lighting talks as a mini-conference/meetup of its own that happens within the actual conference. As such, I try to find interesting topics from fun speakers.

What is a Lightning Talks?

If you don't already know, lightning talks are small sessions, lasting 5 to 10 minutes each, in quick succession. The first edition happened in during the 2019 Developers Conference and I received very positive feedback! There was an attempt to redo it in DevCon2020 but Covid struck!

When the conference was finally confirmed for 2022, I contacted people who I thought would be able to deliver short and fun presentations for the audience. After a 3 day conference full of technical sessions, I like keeping this session very light, and fun. The whole point is that during these numerous sessions, you will learn at least something new, if not, you had fun watching it all happen!

Intros

I made custom intro videos for all the speakers, as a treat, and to hype them up before their sessions!

LineUp

Ish Sookun - Why mirrors matter?
Girish Mahabir - Containers
Jestha B - Web Bundles
Michael Jules - Directus
Priyeshan Sreeneebus - How to juice up your game
Chittesh Sham - Sound Design
Sandeep Ramgolam - Codeflow Girish

Intro

I setup a small countdown so that the audience knows exactly when we would begin. It's funny that a small side project of mine made it up to that huge screen, and the confetti actually worked when the timer expires. That clock was literally made with CSS.

Ish Sookun - Why mirrors matter?

As he is the most versatile speaker out of us all, I asked Ish to open the floor and take his time as we had 30 more minutes than planned. I wanted to avoid some kind of awkward 30 minute of downtime between the end of the lightning talks and when the organizers start the closing ceremony. We did end up finishing right on time, but I couldn't do a fun quiz session I planned for last for fear of running overtime. It all worked out in the end.

He spoke about Mirrors, and why they're important. Especially for our African region. We are far away from most EU/US datacenters, and having mirrors here really change our experience of the internet.

Girish Mahabir- Containers

Girish was up next, and he spoke about containers. He's a very enthusiastic and energetic young person in tech who has been involving himself in the community, and it was refreshing seeing him up on stage sharing his experience with containers. We joked about making him stand on an actual container for the intro video, but that ended up remaining in the realm of dreams.

Jestha B - Web Bundles

Jestha who's a full-stack woman in tech and has a soft spot for Go, spoke about Web Bundles. Something relative new and unknown to most people in web development.

Michael Jules- Directus

Mike, who is too humble to admit that he is a 10x engineer, spoke about Directus. It's a free and open source CMS built in Vue and has been getting better and better every month. It can be considered a low/no code tool that helps you manage the content side of your websites.

Priyeshan Sreeneebus - How to juice up your game

Priyesh took the stage and impressed everyone with his amazing 5-minutes talk about how to juice up your game. The demo was fascinating and the way it was delivered really conveyed the original idea.

Chittesh Sham - Sound Design

All the intros that I made for the speakers had original soundtracks made by Chittesh. I asked him to do the lightning talk about sound design itself, and boy did he show up to the party. He built a track live on stage and within a few minutes had everyone clapping.

Sandeep Ramgolam

It was hard to top the previous session, I ended the lightning talks with a small demo of a Cloud based IDE called Codeflow that was recently released by stack blitz. I feel like I could have done a better job on this one and probably rushed it a little. I did get feedback after the talk that people didn't know about the tool and went on to use it. That was awesome to hear.