Nerdearla closed its tenth anniversary in Argentina with record attendance, preparing for Mexico and Madrid in 2025

Nerdearla, one of the largest technology conventions in Latin America, closed its tenth edition with a record number of attendees: 12 thousand people visited the Konex in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Abasto between Thursday and Saturday of last week and 30 thousand people They joined online.

With talks by personalities such as Ken Thompson, one of the creators of UNIX, and Radia Perlman, nicknamed “the mother of the Internet,” the event was a nerdy party that even had a chess tournament and activities for the little ones.

With the organization of Sysarmy, the Argentine systems community, which was founded 12 years ago with the objective of creating networking and promoting the exchange of knowledge, the more than 150 talks and activities and the more than 200 speakers from 20 countries were the protagonists of the 2024 edition.

In addition, more than 200 people attended the “Galileo Galilei” Planetarium in the City of Buenos Aires on Friday, September 27, the second in-person day. There, another meeting was held with two Argentine figures of global relevance: Clara O’Farrella 37-year-old engineer who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Guillermo Trottia leading spatial architect in this area.

“Seeing Nerdaarla’s agenda and finding international speakers of the caliber of this year’s ones fills us with pride and never ceases to surprise us: Radia Perlman, Ken Thompson -the creator of the UNIX operating system (predecessor of Linux, OS X, iOS and Android)-, Patrick Debois -creator of the “DevOps Revolution”-, Gabriela González -Argentine scientist known for her contributions to research on gravitational waves-, and many others,” highlights Eduardo Casarero, one of the organizers.

Each of them gave talks where they told about their experiences and their area of ​​expertise, as well as being available to answer questions from the audience.

For example, Radia Perlman, who spoke about the challenges that people face when dealing with technology, in which passwords, identifications and other challenges are constantly requested, which, although necessary, are still annoying and more than once complicate our lives. In his words, taking a passage from his book “Network Security: private Communication in a Public World”: “Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing these types of operations.”

Ken Thompson who surprised by confessing that he was a bad student and who was about to drop out of school. However, at a certain point, something changed and he began to stand out. So much so, that he was recruited by Bell Labs, despite initially having no intention of working. It was the people he met there and the possibility of doing what he was passionate about, like at university, that convinced him. With the difference that, this time, they would pay him for it. That’s how he decided to stay and worked there for 34 years. “Operating systems were not our goal, what we wanted was to build something that would help us write programs,” he concluded.

Another curiosity came from Jim Hall, who began his presentation speaking a little in Spanish. The defender of free software shared an anecdote from 1994, when he read in a computer magazine that Microsoft established that the next version of Windows (a system that he did not like) would no longer use DOS. By then there were people coming together to create an open source UNIX system, so he thought they should do the same for DOS. And on June 29, 1994, he sent out an announcement saying: “Let’s create our own version of DOS, which will be something that everyone can use.” “I quickly realized that what we were really creating was free software,” he added.

Thus it was, that during the 5 days of talks, specifically technological topics were discussed such as programming, development, JavaScriptcomputer security, artificial intelligence, etc., and also scientific topics such as gravitational waves, satellites, space designs and other more everyday topics such as gambling addictionjob searches, disease treatment, autism, among many others.

“Thanks to some of these talks we learned that 1% of the world’s population is on the autism spectrum, according to Melissa Muñoz Flández, who at the age of 27 was diagnosed as autistic with divergent attention and there she was able to understand things that were happening to her and realize that it was not that she did not adapt to the world but that the world actually did not adapt to her. At that moment, this programmer and history and geography teacher could be happier and discovered that she wanted to make a contribution to the community so that everyone who had the same condition could have a better quality of life. Created a free app called AutisAppwhich has 17 thousand users and seeks to strengthen autonomy, to improve the lives of people with autism. It is also aimed at their caregivers and the professionals who work with them,” explained the Nerdearla organization.

“It can be used from 9 years old onwards, it has a simple interface since one of my objectives is to build a community, build networks, to get to know each other and learn from others,” highlighted Muñoz Flández.

One of the featured workshops was “Tools to search for employment in the digital world for people +50”, where data from a Manpower study was provided that says that 78% of companies have difficulties filling their vacancies and that only 2 out of every 10 job offers are intended for that age segment.

“But they also reflected on age, as a simple number, and not as something that defines people, who in any case, with growth, gain experience to contribute to their path.” They explained from the organization.

“The first ones who have to leave ‘ageism’ behind are us, who start interviews and conversations saying ‘I’m old now, I’m already 50.’ In this way, we put age first as if that were a problem, when it is something that goes with life itself. This does not open or close doors. If I consider myself a person with capacity, ability and objectives, I will get where I want to go,” remarked Maritza Hernández, one of the trainers.

Continuing with the numbers, they also accompanied the level of presence in said workshop: “It was witnessed by more than 220 people,” commented Ariel Jolo, founder of Nerdearla.

“In addition, more than 100 simulated IT job interviews and more than 50 with sponsors were carried out during the 3 in-person days at the Konex and there were more than 500 boys and girls present who were able to play, learn and enjoy the live bands (Power Upthe anime and video game music orchestra, and Bigotes de Chocolate, a musical group for children), the escape rooms and the 16 children’s activities (robotics workshops, remote-controlled car tracks, musical instrument assembly workshop, games simultaneous chess games where 10 participants played against the under 20 world champion Candela Francisco, a modular toy assembly workshop, among others,” he added.

Nerdearla is a 100% free event that takes place every year in Buenos Aires and since last year also in Chile.

This 2024 it is preparing to disembark in Mexico and in 2025, in Madrid.