As they say, AI Engineer Code is by invitation only. They have hand-selected the top builders and leaders in AI Engineering for a highly curated experience. The team behind the event also helped organize meetups and hackathons happening around the city.

Some interesting sessions (from descriptions) that I am looking forward to:

• 2026: The Year the IDE Died by Steve Yegge, Sourcegraph, and Gene Kim, IT Revolution
• Autonomy Is All You Need by Michele Catasta, Replit
• Don’t Build Agents, Build Skills Instead by Barry Zhang and Mahesh Murag, Anthropic
• Research to Reality with Google DeepMind by Kat Kampf and Ammaar Reshi, Google

Some of the AI Engineer Code events will be live-streamed on YouTube. Check out the video here:

I will share my thoughts on the experience and key takeaways after the events, seminars, and workshops. Should be awesome, profound, scary, and awesome.

Side note: On the AI Engineer Code site, there was a cool wave ASCII art animation that showed the AIE logo, NYC landmarks in an animated wave. I used Claude to make me one.

I am really excited to give this talk in person with my community manager peers and heroes at the awesome meeting space, Convene, located at One Boston Place, Boston, MA. AI is on everyone’s minds, and probably more so for community professionals. Community is really about connection and engagement with people, joining together for a movement. How does AI fit into this? Will it be disruptive? Chen and I are going to explore all of these questions, provide some answers, and mostly get us all thinking about the future of community in the era of AI.

I hear the event is almost sold out, but there are a few remaining spots for the summit. Register here: https://communityroundtable.com/product/community-technology-summit-2023/

Connect is the main event for The Community Roundtable, a professional organization for all of us who are trying to start movements and build out community programs to, ahem, change the world. Connect blends expert community builders with unique networking, collaboration, and learning opportunities for every level of community leader. You’ll walk away with meaningful new connections and ways to improve your community program immediately.

I look forward to seeing you again and meeting a bunch of new people in the community of community professionals. If you can’t make the event, you can always chat with me and others about community on The Quandary Discord server.

Big pitcure. We are going to install the norwii Preernter woftware, config the buttons on the presenter remote, and create a custom AutoHotkey script to intercept the button presses and send them to PowerPoint. If you don’t do this, the presenter remote will only work when PowerPoint is in focus. That works well in some situations, but it doesn’t work as well for online meetings where you are moving around your desktop to monitor the chat, look a response, or find a document.

Buy the Norwii N28 Presenter Remote on Amazon. The N28 has a big button for advancing slides. It’s wireless. And, most of the buttons are customizable. I also like this model since it uses a AAA battery instead of a rechargeable battery. The rechargeable model sounds like a good idea, but I have found out that it is always dead when you want to use it. With the replaceable battery model, you just replace the battery if it is dead. From my experience and usage, the AAA battery lasts almost a year.

Install the Norwii Presenter Utility for Windows. This software has the driver for the wireless dongle and also a tool for remapping the buttons of your remote to new buttons. You can remap all of the buttons (except the laser pointer button). The software is not necessarily easy to use, but it gets the job done. Other presentation remotes lack the ability to be reprogrammed. This is why I love the Norwii models.

Customize the Norwii Presenter buttons. Click on the Customize tab in the utility and make sure N28 (M) is selected as the model. Under each key configure the short press function for each mapping that you have in AutoHotkey (more on that in a moment). The big yellow button is known as the “Page down” key. I use Shift + F12 to advance my slides in PowerPoint. you can do the other buttons if you like. I have experimented with programing all of the buttons to advance the slides. That way I don’t have to fumble around trying to pick the right button in the heat of the moment. But, I have expanded this to backing up a slide (page up key) and exiting the presentation with the enter key. I practiced a few times to get this right. Let me know in the comments what works for you.

Also, make sure that the Norwii Presenter Utility starts up with Windows. This will make sure that the utility is running in the background after you reboot to install Windows updates. Click the Setup tab and select, “Start Norwii Presenter after Windows startup.”

Install and configure AutoHotkey. We are going to use an awesome utity for Windows PCs called AutoHotkey. This utility listen for your custom key presses redirects the controls to PowerPoint. Let me warn you now ff this is your first time using AutoHokey. You are going to get addicted to automation. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Install AutoHotkey on your Windows PC. AHK will run in the background waiting for keyboard commands that match the rules that you have created. For help, check out the documentation and the Hello World video on YouTube. I know, it will be daunting at first, but a community of people for the last decade have been creating videos, examples, and tutorials. You just might be inspired to automate other computing tasks. My goal is to map Shift+F12 and Shift+F11 to Page Up and Page Down. Page Up and Page Down are keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint.

1. Right-click on your desktop
2. Find “New” in the menu
3. Click “AutoHotkey Script” inside the “New” menu
4. Name it PowerPoint.ahk
5. Right-click on PowerPoint.ahk and click “Edit Script”
6. Enter the v1 or v2 and save:

+F12::
    
    If WinExist("PowerPoint Slide Show")
    {
        WinActivate ;
        Send {PgDn}
        return
    }
    Else
    {
        ControlSend,mdiClass1,+{F5},ahk_exe POWERPNT.EXE
        return
    }

+F11::

    if WinExist("PowerPoint Slide Show")
    {
        WinActivate ;
        Send {PgUp}
        return
    }

    return

+F8::
       
    if WinExist("PowerPoint Slide Show")
    {
        WinActivate ;
        Send {Esc}
	return
    }

    return

For more AutoHotkey button mappings, check out my GitHub repository.

Use your new power to deliver the ultimate PowerPoint presenation. Now that you are all powerful, open PowerPoint and click the big yellow button on the Norwii N28 remote. This will put your presentaiton into presentation mode. Click the big yellow button again. Your slides or animations advance. Click it again. Your slides advance. It is a beautiful thing.

Let me know in the comments if you try this out. Also, let me know if you have some tricks for PowerPoint or other Windows apps. I am always looking to optimize.

Update: July 11, 2023 – New AutoHotkey v2 Config File

I got a new laptop and had to reinstall my PowerPoint control setup. I noticed that AutoHotkey has changed their configuration files a lot and have defaulted to AutoHotkey v2 and deprecated v1.

I re-wrote the config file for AutoHotkey v2 and updated the code on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/nothans/autohotkey-config-for-powerpoint

I am a panelist on the Makers & Manufactures track. This panel is moderated by Manisha Rajaghatta and includes a great lineup: Emily Roundy, Collins Aerospace, Dean Schifilliti, BAE Systems, Gaby Waldman, Autodesk, and Hans Scharler, MathWorks.

The event will also be streaming on Twitch, so this will be my first official Twitch live stream. I am excited about participating on the panel and attending the rest of the great sessions. See you there!

I am honored to be on the panel along with Jana Boruta / HashiCorp and Xavier Portilla Edo / Voiceflow.

“As people seek new opportunities to meet and collaborate with like-minded developers locally and globally, community-led open source events are becoming more important than ever. The impact of today’s leading Open Source programs are driven by the grassroots, passionate community organizers.”

Some questions that we will tackle:

• What makes a strong open source community? 
• How can we create authentic experiences? 
• How are leading Open Source professionals measuring the success of their programs? 
• As the world shifts into hybrid and in-person experiences, what does the future of open source community events look like?

Join us Thursday, July 29 at 9:00 AM (PDT) for an expert panel where we’ll discuss these topics, share wins and challenges, and connect with other Open Source community leaders across the world.

Register at Bevy. I am looking forward to answering your questions.

I also noticed that during a keynote talk that I gave last year that no one took photos of my slides. Was I doing something wrong? Did I need something provocative on the slides?

Some slides have a lot of information on them. This slide from the Pentagon is the densest slide that I have ever seen.

I started thinking about how much data is contained on a normal PowerPoint slide. The average slide is about 150 KB. My Pixel 2 phone has a 12.2 MP camera. When I take a photo of a PowerPoint slide, I blow up the slide to 3,400 KB. That is a 22x multiplier of data.

No one is doing the studies, so I had to make up some stats. I assume that 2% of conference attendees take photos of slides.

“2% of all [conference] attendees take photos of PowerPoint slides.”
– Hans Scharler

Let’s play that out. For every 1,000 attendees of a conference, 68,000 KB of data gets generated by one 150 KB PowerPoint slide. 24 million people went to a conference in the United States last year. Yikes. Almost all of us back up our photos to Google or iCloud. So, now we have photos of slides stored beside photos of kids, significant others, and vacations forever. We will need to build data centers just to store photos of PowerPoint slides.

If you are interested in seeing my slides from my talk, check out SlideShare.

“My Meme” is a talk about memes, and how we are hardwired to spread ideas. Humans use a process of imitation, transformation, and combination to invent new things, change the culture, or just to share sometime new.

Question: Do Algorithms Dream of Android Sheep?