Chip on Tech

I know what you're thinking:  "Chip you've never stopped to think before, why start now?"  Well, the jokes on you because this post is about my thoughts on the recent IBM Conference Think 2019.  It was held in San Francisco's Moscone Center on Feb 11-14 this year.  This was the first time I've been to an IBM event there, although I was at Oracle OpenWorld there a few years ago when I worked the IBM booth in the expo hall of that event.  The SanFran weather decided to throw a few wrinkles at the IBM event planners by tossing a deluge and a windstorm at them on Wednesday, but everyone persevered and with some squeegees and a few industrial sized shop vacs, order was maintained.

As always, our marketing team outdid themselves on the decorations.  Whether it was the entrance sign big enough to selfie an entire football team:

Or the world's coolest Rebus Logo:
Even the stages were great to look at.  As you can see in this picture of our Chairman and CEO, Ginni…

Are you attending Think 2019 in San Francisco?  There's still time to register if you haven't already!  The conference officially kicks off Tuesday afternoon and you can see my earlier post on Planning for Think if you need a wider overview of the conference.  This post is to show you where I am planning to be and letting you see exactly what sessions have piqued my interest.

First a note: I often have multiple sessions in a single time slot.  This is because as an IBMer it seems only polite that I ensure a customer can attend a session if the room starts to fill up.  Therefore, I try to plan 3 or more sessions for every time slot so I can simply choose a less full room to attend.  This is also useful if I end up in a different location than I originally planned due to a client meeting and want to see a session that's nearby and simply drop in.  So, if you're using this to track me down in SanFran, it would probably be easier to text me.  For the same reason, you will …

If you look at my blog links, have followed me on Twitter, or received an email from my corporate "persona," you may have noticed a link to something called "Keybase" or "PGP."  While I don't do a ton of secure conversations with any of my email addresses, I was interested in the process of achieving the elusive goal of a truly "secure" conversation chain.  In 2016, I was sent an invite to join a new website called keybase.io their business model was the ability to post your public PGP key to allow other folks to send you an encrypted message or decrypt a message you had sent.  For a brief description of how public-key cryptography works, here's Wikipedia:
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is a cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys which are known only to the owner. The generation of such keys depends on cryptographic algorithms based on mathematica…