Monday morning started with a short walk to the venue. The first few minutes were against the flow of Toronto commuters pouring off a GO train and walking to nearby offices, which was quite an experience. But on reaching the 44th and 43rd floors, the reward was an amazing view!

I was worried about whether this year's food would be able to match the wonderful food we had our first two years, at a hotel. Well, it's been just as good and even better at times. Here's the morning pastries and fruit:

I had the opening keynote again this year. Here's the empty room after my tech check:

My talk went really well. This was the first time I had ever given it. I really wanted to reach the younger people, and I believe I did, to make sure they are aware there are things they can do early on to build up resources that will help you have a happy and healthy old age, and program for as long as you want to. I'll blog a link to the recording when it's live. Here's a picture from Twitter:

After my talk, I attended "C++ is a MetaCompiler" by Daniel NikPayuk. He had terrific outlining on his slides.

I urge everyone who is doing a talk to bake all their highlighting and "notice here that" into the slides themselves. Show the code, then advance or build or whatever you call it in your slide tech, so that the thing you want to show people is highlighted in some way. A coloured background like this works fine. Talk to it, then advance to the next thing. This is quicker than anything you might do with a mouse or other tool on the fly, it looks neater, it is guaranteed to be on the recording (pointing with your hand or a laser pointer never is), and the slides themselves remind you of the things you wanted to point out on them! I learned a lot from Daniel this week, starting in this talk but not ending there.

Then I watched Beginner's Mind, Expert's Mind by Dawid Zalewski. This talk was literally about minds in a way I wasn't expecting and it was very good. Highly recommended.

After lunch (spent mostly goggling at the amazing views, but the food continued to be very good) I went to "Software Engineering Completeness : Knowing when you are done and why it matters" by Peter Muldoon and "Meandering Through C++ to Create ranges::to" by Rud Merriam. I really enjoyed both of these, one for having no code at all but understanding how code fits into the big picture, and the other for having a lot of code and opinions about that code.

Then I went back to the hotel for a nap so that I could attend the Belonging Dinner in the evening. Negar Farjadnia talked about living as your authentic self and how even if there are a lot of barriers to that, putting in the effort to overcome those barriers and reach a place where you can live authentically brings huge rewards, not just in being happier but in many other aspects of your life.

What a first day! Super pleased with how it went!

Kate