This weekend I went to Cat Barcamp 2015, an unconference run by the PSU Computer Action Team. I went to some awesome talks (and gave one myself).

I enjoyed every talk I went to. Here they are in order:

1. History of Cryptography. This was given by one of my OSL co-workers. It didn't contain a ton of new information for me, but was delivered very well and focused on different types of cryptography and the context in which each one was developed. I enjoyed it.

2. Haskell on Steroids. I kinda checked out during this talk because I wanted to write my slides... Wooops. It looked very interesting and mathey though...

3. Introduction to Test Driven Development in Power Shell. Whoa Windows (actually though, I learned more about Power Shell than I ever expected to know).

4. MY TALK. (see below)

5. A Whirlwind Tour of Lojban. Lojban seems like a cool language. Corbin (previous LUG president) gave this talk, he's a cool guy... you might even say he's TheMostAwesomeDude.

6. Adventures in IT Security: Then and now. I like history. I also like computers. This was a good talk. I am biased.

7. Talking to people! (or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the user.) Spoiler: The secret is understanding social cues.

My Talk

I decided on the spur of the moment to give a talk 'How to Write a (very mediocre) Static Site Generator' and with only 40 minutes of prep work I was able to fill an hour pretty well.

Here are some links from that:

• The demo code.
• The abomination of a website we built between the demo and the end of the session (epilepsy warning... no seriously).
• The very sparse slides.

TLDR

The CAT is an awesome group of people. I'm glad I was able to get a few LUG members to come to the event. If I went to PSU I would be honored to work with the CAT. They throw a hellofan event.