I recently gave a talk and a carried out a workshop (on TypeScript of-course) at Siseix. Just wanted to share my experience for future presenters at the conference.
The conference is held in Culiacán Mexico (wikipedia) every year.
The trip
The trip from Melbourne Australia to Culiacán is actually quite long (15hours to Los Angeles and then 6 hours to Culiacán). Ofcourse most places from down under are actually quite far so this is not much different.
Since you are reading this let me make it worth your while and mention a few things :
- As an aussie you need to get ESTA which you can apply online https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/ to travel through USA to anywhere.
- The Melbourne airport provided me with this link so if it changes you can always ask them. Note that they warned me that just googling for
ESTAcan give you the wrong link so be mindful. - It costs 14USD and is easy enough to fill.
Other than that you don’t need anything special to make your way to Mexico.
The conference
The conference is held at one of the campuses of Tecnológico Nacional de México. The main audience are the teachers and the student from various university campuses around Culiacán.
I got to interact with a few students informally (backstage) before the presentation. I am quite impressed with their caliber and knowledge of whatever form of programming inspired them (e.g. android application development, web development). Programming is definitely something that you get an expertise of if you feel strongly motivated and this only went on to prove them and I quite enjoyed the conversations.
Then the presentation in an impressively setup hall:
The hall was quite full, and people actively participated raising their hands to questions like “Who here has heard of AngularJS”. Always good to ask questions as it makes the audience feel like a part of the conversation. All my talk was in English. They had a uni developed in-house application to collect questions during the talk. After the talk, the hosts came out to present to questions to me. The hosts were actually impressed that the students had asked the questions in English as well (they were expecting the need to translate the questions for me).
Next up was the workshop. A few of the hosts joined to help translate for the students. This actually proved to be quite a lot of fun as the teachers asked me a bunch of questions regarding how TypeScript handles familiar and advanced programming language constructs like nullability, generics, immutability, async await etc. They would then reword what I said down for the students based on what they knew the students to know (e.g. stuff from C#). This resulted in a much more meaningful, interactive and fun workshop than I had prepared ( I had prepared step 1, step 2 style workshop). Quite a few people connected with me after the workshop to say thanks which is always nice.
In the end they gave me nice certificates for the presentation and the workshop.
Summary
In short if you get a chance to present at SiSei, go for it. You will not regret it 🌹. Other people that have presented include Richard Stallman and Guy Kawasaki ❤️.
