Pittsburgh TechFest 2024
Yesterday I went to Pittsburgh TechFest 2024 at the Commonwealth Charter Academy building on the Waterfront. The venue was nice, the food was good, and both keynotes were interesting—though I definitely did not know enough about SNL to fully appreciate the closing.
My favorite talk was by Dominika Blach of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank about how they’re using low-code solutions for an organization that needs technology solutions but can’t afford developers. I knew nothing about low code but can imagine a lot of organizations with similar constraints who need professionals who can navigate that world for them.
I gave a talk title Thinking Outside the Bots: A human-centric approach to model interactions and discussed some of my thoughts about how we build features using AI1. I got to share some of the cool things that I’ve been working on at Khan Academy and felt validated by the responses. The talk was well received, sparking interesting conversations afterwards and a couple invitations to give the talk again to other groups.
For the first time, I enjoyed the networking side of the event more than the talks. I had the chance to reconnect with some former colleagues at Niche, met some of the folks from Carnegie Learning, talked with friends, and saw a lot of familiar faces from last year. I handed out some business cards (vintage 2017) and made some good connections.
It’s hard to feel connected to the local tech scene when you work remotely for a company based 2,200 miles away. So I think it’s important for workers like me to invest time in events like this. Looking forward to next year!
Footnotes
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tl;dr I think that chatbots are a bad UI for most use cases and that we should focus our design efforts on user needs and defined outcomes ↩