This week I was at Devoxx 2013 in Belgium. Like the previous years I helped film the event. Together with other a couple of Devoxx4Kids organizers we also did a session and an informal BoF talk. I might do some more posts on the actual conference sessions later, lot of cool things to talk about, from making live music with Clojure and OverTone to flying quadcopters with digital bracelets.

Digital me

For me the biggest eye opener was during the pre-conference speakers dinner. Three times during this dinner/reception I was talking to someone and only after 30 minutes they suddenly realized they already knew me… online, not in real life. Because I’ve always used a crazy blue avatar and the anonymous ‘redcode.nl’ URL, people can’t possibly connect the face to the online presence. That is when Tasha Carl suggested to me to use an actual picture instead. (just noticed she also doesn’t have a recognizable picture, the irony!)

When I got to the hotel that evening and fired up my laptop I decided to quickly bridge the gap between my digital appearance and real life. I’ve now changed my avatar at Twitter/Facebook/Vimeo/LinkedIn etc to the image above (the iconic blue creature is still there!). Also as you might have noticed I’ve decided to switch my complete website to my other domain: royvanrijn.com. All the links online that point to redcode.nl will still work, but all the links on that page point to the new domain.

Instant confirmation

The following day I was walking around on the conference floor when a woman approached me. She asked “Are you Roy?”. It turned out I replied to a tweet she wrote earlier that day and recognized my face from the image. Confirmation couldn’t be more instant!

The Devoxx theme this year was “Reborn at Devoxx”, at this is absolutely true for me, my digital identity is actually reborn!