Eve Porcello is speaking at Epic Web Conf 2025

Hello, everybody. I'm so excited to be here today joined by my friend Eve Porcello. Did I say your last name right Eve? Yeah, it's excellent Yes, the second pronunciation was even better yeah Yeah, so Eve you and I go back quite a while

I'm trying to remember when we first met were you in the angular community? Back in the day or no, not really. I kind of missed the angular wave I was more I don't know what I was even doing at that time But I think we got to know each other through react stuff, okay

So it would have been like we probably met like 2015 2016 Like it's been a while like that's almost 10 years ago. Actually. Yeah, it's hard to hard to stomach that a little bit, but yeah Crazy 2015 is 10 years ago. Yeah, that is yeah, that is kind of wild. I I think you know

Why 2k was 25 years ago? Anyway, I I will sometimes say to like in a group with my family. I'll say I feel like I'm getting old Well, I'm the second to the last of my family and my dad is in his 70s And he looks over at me like what are you talking about? People don't like it when you say that to them when they're yeah

I'm excited to have you speaking at the conference before we get into what you're talking about I'd love for people to get to know you a little bit. Can you give us a quick intro to yourself? Sure Yeah, my name is Eve Porcello. I Let's see have been teaching and working in the JavaScript world for the last. I guess it's almost like

13 years now 14 years. I work on video courses and books and teaching workshops in person and also Work on all sorts of developer tools and things like that alongside that Very cool. So what what?

Areas, do you teach mostly and what areas do you work in regularly? Yeah So I went pretty deep into the react and graph QL world for a long time now I'm teaching a lot of more meta classes. So teachers for teachers and

Kind of presentation skills things like that and then teach still a lot of JavaScript and a lot of AI stuff now So getting into teaching all of these tools that we're gonna need to know about as things evolve in that space

Well, that's exciting because your talk is about AI and presenting so I guess that makes sense that tracks Title is building an AI assistant to deliver your best presentations. So I'm that that piques my interest

Of course, I I selected your talk of the many and it's not the the other interesting thing is you're not speaking alone So, can you tell us a little bit about your talk and what you're planning on? Absolutely, so I've been working with my friend Kira Corbett. She's an amazing person She was also born in 2000 like the y2k situation. So

She always reminds me of her age, but her She'll tell you about her own background As just like a super human programmer of all sorts of cool things She works a lot in IOT and AI stuff and I'm super inspired by all of her work

So we were talking about how we could start to use AI in our presentations And so the title of our talk is a little bit of a joke in that there's many of metal layers going on about how we're going to Build our own AI Presentation but also

Have a I start to do some of our work for us there. So I try not to give too much away It is gonna be fun I yeah, don't give away too much. I don't want it to be spoiled it's like watching a trailer for a movie and they give you all of the Spoilers for the whole thing. Yeah, I don't want that. I'll try not to yeah. Oh

That sounds like a lot of fun it sounds really interesting and pertinent there will be Plenty of engineers there who are individual contributors and and that they just like clock in they work on some code and then they clock out why is Like developing a presenting skill all that useful for those people and and how does AI relate to that?

Yeah, so I think it helps us with communication throughout our team So even if you are working as an individual contributor, you still have to share your ideas with other people and coach folks who are

On your teams as well. I think that this will help for people going to give presentations, but We do build a demo in the Presentation that uses a lot of cool AI libraries and things like that So kind of thinking about how you can start to inject some weird fun things into your own

applications, we're gonna be using ml5 and some other AI libraries that kind of build upon the JavaScript tools that we love but Take them in a new direction with more machine learning and some things that can accelerate our Work, I think there's a lot of cool

Voice recognition stuff that our talk uses as well. So that's kind of we're thinking about that like a cool Accessibility thing for our apps that we're building as well as just making things faster as these tools get better Well, that sounds very interesting. Yeah, I completely agree that

The developers need to be able to communicate in fact, I would say that with AI improving on a regular basis your ability to communicate is Becoming and and to like have interpersonal relationships with people is becoming your differentiating factor You know against AI and so yeah developing these

Presentational skills is really critical for that Yeah, I think you're so right about like just because AI is advancing and it's going to change the way that we work I think there's a way to really not get too worried about that and also lean into the human aspects of

Connection and that's why I think going to a conference is so good where you're like actually having those conversations Versus talking at people in a little text box Sending it along and going back to your day. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there through Presentations just to connect with people and share your own unique weird

Interesting ideas. Mm-hmm. Yep. Love it and the weird ones, especially You will see So you Talked about this a little bit and how important it is for people to develop these connections What are some other reasons why you feel like it's worthwhile to go to conferences? Why do you?

Travel and go through all the effort to prepare talks and stuff Because like as an educator you're doing lots of online stuff. So why why couldn't you just get all of your Work done online and then just stay comfortably at home. Why do you have to leave the house? Great question. I think

It is a really important thing I do love remote work and all those things but there's something that is Just tangibly better about going and actually speaking to people in real life. You're gonna have time essentially just to spend with people and through that time comes the

conversations that you probably wouldn't have if you're just kind of having these asynchronous communications or maybe you're Presenting something and you don't get to get as in the weeds. So in teaching I think that I have taught a few classes in person and I have just felt like oh I miss this or I go to a conference

And I'm like, oh, this is really like I am gonna follow up with this person that I had this conversation with because that was A really interesting thing that they brought up or you just are kind of immersed in so much Information throughout the day, which I feel like is a really good way to

Go back to your little cave. Like I'm in Particularly KB today and to put together like your new You're gonna approach all of your work with a new set of eyes because you're dealing what you're just getting so much more Information. So yeah. Yeah that and that checks out a lot

Like if you're going if you're doing something online The conversations are just even if it's a like a real-time thing like the conversations are More like shallow is another quite. You know what? I mean? Like they're just not they don't go as deep And so yeah in person and then on top of that you can't

Ski on the Utah slopes if you don't come out to epic web comps You could try but it the simulation is just not the same as And another thing about that I think March such a killer time an underrated ski time

I feel like across the country, but especially in Utah. There's such good spring skiing. So yeah Yeah, lots of people just check out. Okay, it's February's done. We're done. Yeah No, and that's part of what's nice about this too is like a lot of people will take off and and so for those listening You don't know we are doing an unofficial ski day

It's unofficial because I don't want to deal with any of the legal stuff of making it official But we're all just meeting up there at at solitude the day after the conference and there will probably be a bunch of us last year we had Like eight of us who went up together and I expect there'll be more this year. So it's gonna be a lot of fun

Definitely don't miss it and Eve is a good skier. I've never skied with you before so I'm looking forward to it I haven't either I'm looking forward to that as well. And I love teaching people as a program But I especially love teaching people how to skis and taking people and getting people excited So even if you haven't gone I would say definitely come send me a message

I'd love to get you on skis if you haven't been so oh, I love it. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks Eve Okay, Eve last thing so what when we're at the conference and we're standing around People are gonna see you and be like, oh I need to meet Eve What is the topic that they could bring up that would get you really excited and talkative?

I would love to talk about all sorts of different things skiing. Of course. I'd love to talk about AI. I'd love to talk about your favorite Developer tool that's helping save you time or if you have any good tips on video production Kent I'm noticing you're awesome setup so turned up to

11 since I last saw it So it's really exciting to see all the little projects people are working on. So yeah, do definitely come talk to me Awesome. Hey Eve. Thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to seeing you again in Utah in March, it's gonna be awesome and

Yeah, we'll see you there soon. See you there. Thanks. Bye everyone

Eve Porcello

Developer Educator @ Moon Highway

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