It was really exciting to visit the US for the second time, especially with a huge hardcovered utility box, with an old espresso machine inside! Thunder Plains seems like the local community conference around Oklahoma and the surrounding nations, but that's a bit deceiving. This event - althought it wasn't always called Thunder Plains - is maybe older than JSConf itself, Jesse and Amanda Harlin are doing this for the local community since years. The Oklahoma tech community is proud to give the world talented people like Kyle Simpson or John-David Dalton.

Everything was super-fine until I've realized one major flaw in my planning for the talk: the coffee machine I've brought was an old one, more than 20 years old. It's power requirements were waaay over 110V, the standard for the United States. It was not a question of plug converter, I needed a step-upper, a kind of transformator, that made 220Volts from 110. Jesse and Amanda were awesome, they tried to help me find such a device the day before the event, but we've failed - so I used a backup video during the presentation, I've made at home - in case the TSA does find my huge plastic box dangerous, and the machine fails to arrive in the county. Here are the slides for my talk:

But the luckily the talk and the whole trip was a success, I've received really positive feedback. Doring and after the event I've had the pleasure to meet Adam Baldwin, who started the NodeSecurity project. As I was curious, he explained how they manage to pinpoint malicious npm pacakage installs within seconds, using docker and sysdig. I've met with Laurie Voss from npm again, and it was great to see John-David Dalton in person, and hear from the esm loader he's working on nowadays.

Oklahoma City is the 8th largest city in the US by land area, it streches through the Great Plains region, it was super flat. The business district has some skyscrapers, but on the whole, its a reaaly flat city, with a rich history of western culture. I've visited the science museum on the day after the conference, and they happen to have an actual size replica of an F1 rocket engine, one of five that powered the 1st stage of the Saturn rockets during the Apollo missions.