IMAX Screens, Duck Boats, and Myrtle the Turtle: My SquiggleConf Recap

It was my privilege to be the opening speaker for the first SquiggleConf, a conference on web developer tooling hosted at the New England Aquarium in Boston, MA.

I was invited to share my story of creating Oh My Zsh, which I first created a little over 15 years ago to make my life as a web developer a little easier. I shared some theories on why it has become so "popular" and several lessons learned over the years.

Given that it was at the aquarium, my slides were projected onto a massive IMAX screen. I didn't realize this needed to be on my bucket list, but ✅!

For the first time in many years, this was the first conference I attended that I didn't know any of the other speakers before meeting them at the speaker dinner. Many of the web dev tools referenced were used by software teams working in different technical stacks, from Rust to Zig. It was an excellent opportunity to immerse myself in another programming paradigm for a few days, a stark contrast to what I had experienced just one week before in Toronto, speaking at Rails World 2024.

The schedule was jam-packed. It was a mixture of longer 30-minute talks with short 10-minute talks in between. A few notable talks that resonated with me were:

Excalidraw: Canvas All The Way Down by Aakansha Doshi

I'd only recently heard of Excalidraw, but I learned that Planet Argon team members and a few of our clients use it regularly. In Aakansha's talk, she walked us through some of the underlying math and data modeling required to render this software tool in a browser. She did a great job of demystifying it for us.

Diving Into The Chrome DevTools Performance Panel by Rick Viscomi

Most web developers have used some of Chrome's DevTools, but Rick showed us some clever ways to leverage them for both production and local development purposes. He also showed us some of the new innovations coming soon and gave us some very practical advice.

How To Write About Software by Jess Lin

While there were several great talks, Jess Lin's talk about writing about software was timely. Jess works for Render and shared some examples of how she's helping their engineering team improve their blog articles. She guided us through her process in a way that resonated with me and other attendees.

Web Animations: Tools and Techniques by Rachel Nabors

In this talk, Rachel showed us a demo of a web-based animation they had initially released several years ago. As web technologies have evolved, Rachel has opted to re-implement it with different tooling and libraries, so they walked us through a series of rewrites over the years.

Again, there were several great talks -- these four stood out for me.

I'm looking forward to sharing a few of these talks with the Planet Argon engineering team once published.

Big thanks to Dimitri Mitropoulos and Josh Goldberg for putting on a good conference. I'm delighted that I was able to both attend and participate.

They also treated the speakers to a Boston Duck Boat tour, and I got to drive one on the Charles River for a few minutes.

What is a Duck Boat? It's essentially a quasi-tour bus that can also go on water.

They did announce that there will be a SquiggleConf 2025, so if you're interested in web developer tooling and are looking for an excellent excuse to visit Boston, I recommend it.

P.S. Special thanks to the aquarium's Myrtle the Turtle, who made a special on-screen appearance during my talk.