Hanging up the wigs
- 1 minI’ve hung up the wigs for 2025.
But be warned. . . they’ll be back on occasion in 2026.
In recent years, the two talks I’ve delivered the most have both had a gimmick. Something to create a photo opportunity as part of an event, and hopefully to put a smile on the audiences face.
It worked!
Well. . . most of the time.
Without giving away the moment, the wigs and hats were both an integral part of the talks. But you (or even the organiser) can only play the fool so often, and it’s time to be a little more serious with the content I deliver. So whilst they’ll both be back, they’ll be used mainly for meetups where things are a little more informal and expectations on takeaway learnings are a little lower.
But one of the projects behind the talk has changed a huge amount over the years. Plus it’s super fun to work on.
Back then it was little more that a clone of a platform demo with a changed h1 tag, a ton of showmanship, and a dash of hot bars. Today, it’s grown into a multi API backend encompassing locally hosted speech recognition, LLMs, and image recognition paired with either a website or .NET tMAUI desktop app as the interface. It’s even binging in the hot newness that is Aspire to both the web and .NET stacks.
Naturally, the software is a bit shaky. That’s part of the fun. However the learnings are solid and it keeps a mechanism for growing my hat collection a little more.
The trickiest part?
Fitting the details into a paragraph or two so I can submit to conferences!
Wish me luck 🤞
Originally featured on LinkedIn.