Back in August 2019 I have a talk at the local [Front End Web Developers (Fenders)](https://www.meetup.com/Front-End-Web-Developers-Perth/) meetup group here in Perth. Its taken them a little while but the talk is finally up on Youtube!



# The Talk

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OFKYo8lvS7E" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

As you could probably guess if you had looked at my past few years worth of posts on this blog I have been using Typescript on a daily basis and I am really impressed with the power of the type system so I thought I would try to share some of that fascination with others in Perth.

I was really nervous about giving the talk even though it was only short and only to a small (~150 people) local meetup.

[![](./us.jpg)](./us.jpg)

Despite doing it all as a live-coding with audience participation I think it went okay tho im not sure how many people followed along as it it was quite dense.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the game at the end though so perhaps I should have made that the focus of the talk, what do you think?

I totally forgot to post about the various talks I gave this year so I thought I would take a few minutes and post about them.



# A Game Developer Learns Machine Learning

I gave a talk right a the start of this year at the [Perth Machine Learning Meetup Group (PMLG)](https://www.meetup.com/Perth-Machine-Learning-Group/) about my adventures in ML for Mr Nibbles Forever. It went really well and I got a bunch of helpful feedback from the others that know much much more about the topic than I.

I wrote about it in greater detail [here:](talks/a-game-developer-learns-machine-leaning-then-talks-about-it/)

# Mikes Mirror

About 6 months later I gave another talk at PMLG, this time it was about my Smart Mirror project that I had worked on for a couple of weeks / months. It too went surprisingly well, I think even better than the previous talk.

I also wrote a separate blog post on the topic which goes into greater detail [here](/talks/mikes-mirror-the-talk/):

# 2019

I think next year ill give some more talks on various topics that I have been tinkering with. It forces you to dig that little bit deeper and develop a firmer understanding of the topic you are talking about.

Another reason why I think ill continue to give talks in 2019 is to improve my public speaking as it makes very nervous, the best way to remove those nerves is to desensitize myself by doing more of it.

After my many [hard-learnt-lessons](/projects/mikes-mirror-overview/) building a Smart Mirror the past few months, I decided it might be a good idea to share some of those lessons with others in the community.



# The Talk

At the start of the year I gave [a different talk](talks/a-game-developer-learns-machine-leaning-then-talks-about-it/) at the local Machine Learning Meetup group about my very basic explorations of Machine Learning in game development and it went well and the audience was receptive to non ML-heavy talks so I thought it would be a good place to talk about my mirror project although it wasnt strictly Machine Learning focused, it did involve using some off-the-shelf face recognition and audio recognition ML tools.

I produced a slide deck from my previous condensed blogposts on the topic:

1. [Mikes Mirror - Overview](projects/mikes-mirror-overview/)

2. [Mikes Mirror - Hardware](projects/mikes-mirror-hardware/)

3. [Mikes Mirror - Software](/projects/mikes-mirror-software/)

If you are interested the [slides are available](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nD3MhRzxJPYn63N_mdyxkSFqVFoFneQpcYXBlVICJEE/edit?usp=sharing) and the published show is here:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ1P3FygWOUhfUXsfnzCyJQoeyjZbVx-Oynq4vPBSVRZgsXp6OPJm2OPNH6o-vK87fkXZrPPEOwKETy/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="960" height="569" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

The talk went really well. Everyone had a bit of a laugh and I think learnt a little bit about what it takes to build a small IoT device, so im really glad I did it.

To round off my current Machine Learning adventures I gave a talk at a local Machine Learning group.



# Talking about learning

For a while now I have been attending the [Perth Machine Learning Meetup Group (PMLG)](https://www.meetup.com/Perth-Machine-Learning-Group/) and really enjoying the talks by the various incredibly talented data-science and machine learning experts that attend that group. So when they asked for more talks from community members it was with much hesitation that I put my hand up to talk about my minor fumblings in the world of machine learning in game development.

The talk basically went over my posts:

1. [A Game Developer Learns Machine Learning - Getting Started](/machine-learning/a-game-developer-learns-machine-learning-getting-started/)

2. [A Game Developer Learns Machine Learning - A Little Deeper](/machine-learning/a-game-developer-learns-machine-learning-a-little-deeper/)

3. [A Game Developer Learns Machine Learning - Mr Nibbles Basics](/machine-learning/a-game-developer-learns-machine-learning-mr-nibbles-basics/)

The talk went well despite a few internet issues. Most people hadnt done any Unity development before so even thought the ML aspect was probably a little basic for them, at least they will have learnt a little bit about how Unity works :)

I got some great feedback at the end on how I could potentially improve the model's learning through different application of rewards, I took notes and will definately be applying those suggestions next time I do some work on the project.