My LexTalk Experience

What is LexTalk?

LexTalk is a quarterly tech conference that takes place in Lexington, KY. It’s organized by Joe Kratzat, a developer at Oracle. The goal of LexTalk seems to be just to grow the developer community in Lexington and the surrounding area. There have been talks about everything from networking to accessibility on the web to ham radio!

So far, there’s been some good refreshments at each event. We had Canes at the first meet and Papa Johns pizza at the second. Currently, The Cornerstone at the University of Kentucky seems to be the meetup spot for the foreseeable future. For those over 21, The Cornerstone also hosts an Etheral Brewing for some more adult beverages.

I am a freelance developer from Lexington, KY looking for my first role so it was a no brainer to go! I have also been a little involved in making it happen as I did a lot of work on the conference website at https://lextalk.tech. Personally, I would love for the conference to grow and get more parts of the community involved. I very much enjoy the broader “this is about all levels of tech” vibe it has. In its current form, it’s casual and VERY informative. Walking up to the presenters to ask some questions afterward isn’t just acceptable, it’s encouraged!

Who goes to LexTalk?

Honestly, anyone interested in technology. Particularly if you’re a developer, but there are always a talk or two that are very approachable. We’ve had students, we’ve had people just interested in the current AI trend, we’ve had senior developers, and we’ve had community leaders. Honestly, if you have any interest in technology and/or free food, you should come. I’ve met some of the most brilliant people after the talks!

What was discussed?

The schedule was filled with a good mix of things for every level. Here’s the full schedule:

Ham Radio: Where Even Experts are Amateurs

Presenter: Todd Wiley

This was a talk by Todd Wiley, another Oracle developer. It was a really good soft intro to the conference. Todd talked about both how they work as well as some of the surrounding things like the fact that the guy that figured out how to send images over radio is actually a UK grad!

Things I hate about developers

Presenter: Davis St. Aubin

Davis talked about some different things we can do as developers to make their life not so difficult. Things like retries being too fast and hard coding default config variables. All good stuff! Davis also mentioned some of the inequality issues we face in the tech industry, a welcome reminder. (I also learned Davis’s last name is actually “St. Aubin”. A nightmare for putting in a last name with both a space and a . in it!)

Introduction to Vue.js

Presenter: Craig Geil

Craig talked about Vue.js, a framework for building websites similar to React and Angular. He basically walked through some of the introductory things you’d want to know like usage of it in comparison to other frameworks, what jobs are like, and why you’d learn it. On the other side of it, Vue looks like an excellent option if you’re getting into your first framework or just looking to avoid some of the headaches of the other popular frameworks.

ASM R you serious

Presenter: John Martinez

This was one of my favorites. John basically took a page out of John Carmack’s book and locked himself in a hotel room for a weekend and learned about Assembly. He wrote a program that basically acts like assembly code to run some basic python. His entire talk was walking through how a computer works with code (using a simple loop as an example). His “toy” code was very approachable and I came out of it with a much better understanding of how the computer actually does what it does!

LLMs throughout the lifecycle of Generative AI Projects

Presenter: Lee Park

This also was an absolutely amazing talk. Lee is a PhD candidate in statistics at UK apparently with a cool interest in LLM’s! His talk walked through from a high level how these things work. He talked about tokenizing, the encoder-decoder process, embedding, and even touched on what’s being worked on right now with Augmented Retrieval Generation. Seriously cool and cutting edge stuff.

Thanks for reading!

I had a seriously wonderful time at LexTalk. I was able to at least shake hands with most people there. I made a few new friends and also checked in with some I haven’t seen in a long time! There were great conversations about LLM’s, everyone’s latest project, even career advice in some circles. The chats afterward were definitely a highlight of LexTalk and something that I hope continues to be a big part of the conference. If you’re a developer in the bluegrass, or just someone interested in hearing some nerds talk about nerd stuff, come help grow the tech community here in Lexington and join the event in February!