My conferences story

Back in 2015-2019, I used to attend conferences in person only. My first events included GET.NET in Łódź and WROC# in Wrocław. Then I attended .NET Developer Days in Warsaw two times in a row. This one was the first big-size programming conference I took part in.

Back then, I was a newbie junior programmer. I was also a bit shy to talk to people. Probably I had a huge impostor syndrome, as I thought everyone there was better in programming than me. I attended many sessions, even though I didn’t understand many technical aspects and never used them in real life.

I also always used to go to conferences and even meetups with someone I know (a colleague most of the time). If no one was going, I didn’t go alone. This didn’t help in becoming less shy and starting to talk to people I didn’t know ?‍

And then it happened. In 2018, I decided to go to InfoShare conference. Alone ? I still wasn’t very open to talk to anyone encountered, but I was a little braver. I talked to a few awesome speakers, including Michał Szafrański and Marek Jankowski. Those guys really were inspiring to me before, so it was an awesome feeling to talk to them face-to-face ?

InfoShare conference changed my life. It was another booster to make significant changes in my life and become a digital nomad. Several months later, I started working fully remotely for Yumasoft and traveling the world ?

There were some awesome guys like Michał Śliwiński speaking about a fully remote companies at that time already:

I also felt great after attending the NDC Porto 2022. After not seeing fellow programmers in person for more than 4 years, it was awesome to finally be more open and talk to many people at the conference. I was also alone this time.

Talks or people?

What can we take from my conferences’ story? As you read it, you can easily notice that the only things I remember are people. Either talking to one or two speakers or chatting with many people attending the event. That’s what I remember from the event. Technologies and tools come and go, but people stay. You stay connected with them on Twitter/Instagram. Think how nice it would be meeting them again at another conference by coincidence!

On the other hand, I remember almost nothing from Boiling Frogs 2021, which I attended online. That’s how it works for me.

I have to go back to the blog post or my notes to get something from it. This is also useful – that’s why I make notes. However, for me, this is not the real goal of attending a conference. All sessions are anyway recorded and in most cases available for free online after the conference. The community, interactions, Q&A sections and conference parties cannot be transferred to the online world and provide the same value. For me, it simply doesn’t work.

Conclusions

For me, conferences are the people. Not the talks.

However, I had to learn it throughout the years of attending several conferences, both offline and online. That’s why I wanted to share my story with you at the beginning of this article. To give you my perspective.

If you are about to take one thing from this article – please open yourself and talk more to people at the conferences. Try going to a conference alone, or if you go with someone – don’t stick with your fellows all the time. I know this is going out of your comfort zone. I still feel uncomfortable doing that, but I’m trying to improve little by little. If each of us makes a little effort, it will overall become much easier for everyone. Maybe next time I’m walking around the conference room getting stressed on selecting a random person to talk to, you’ll reach me and initiate the conversation? ?

The post Why Do You Attend IT Conferences – For Talks or For People? appeared first on Yumasoft.

.NET

This is going to be the longest section of this article ? I think it’s a bit specific to NDC Conference (“.NET” is the first one on the list of proposed topic for an NDC talk), but there was a lot about .NET. There were quite a few speakers either working for or associated with Microsoft.

I think the most discussed .NET topic was Blazor. There were many sessions discussing various aspect of the Blazor framework, its new features and development. MAUI was also mentioned several times.

Except that, .NET developers and speakers seems interested in issues related to the new versions of .NET (.NET 6/7) and generally this whole new ecosystem that’s being formed. Topics included gRPC/gRPC web, as well as Roslyn compiler possibilities.

Another important area of .NET was the multi-platform thing. It seems to be very important to the teams at Microsoft and contributors to related projects to make everything working on as many platforms as possible. Including desktops (Windows, Linux and Mac), web and mobile (Android and iOS). There were at least few multi-platform solutions discussed several times: Uno, Avalonia, Blazor and MAUI. All seem to be solving similar problems, but each has different entry costs and technologies used.

Software architecture

From software architecture topics, the most popular seemed to be everything around DDD. Not only the fully religious implementations of DDD were discussed, but also some of its simplified forms or just few concepts extracted from it.

It seems it’s all about understanding our end users better. I like it ?

Cloud

Possibilities of various cloud providers were discussed at almost every talk I attended. What I liked about that, is that it was not only Microsoft Azure discussed everywhere as it used to be few years ago ? Cloud is now seen more as a concept rather than concrete cloud providers’ possibilities.

While we still need to support on-premise deployments, cloud seems an inevitable way to go for many applications.

Web

WebAssembly and accessibility. There were the two topics discussed very often in terms of web technologies. Some sessions touched on React, but rather briefly. I even didn’t hear about JavaScript very often, which is actually weird ? TypeScript was also a topic, as well as some frontend testing techniques/frameworks.

UX

I attended two sessions about UX. This is quite interesting for me, as I think we can do much better in terms of usability of our software for the end users.

In general, I love the concept of designing and implementing the application from the user’s point of view. Maybe it sounds obvious, but it’s not always like that. Especially in corporations, when there are several layers between programmers and end users. Each layer adds its own filtering. This process makes the final solution sometimes far away from end users’ expectations.

Soft skills/team leadership

Not only technical stuff at programming conferences in 2022? Sure ?

I also enjoy team leadership and light-management topics. Although not many programmers I talked to especially love those talks. Except the ones who have actually managed people. There were, however, quite a few sessions on that, and I liked them. I think leadership is translatable to everyday life, not only work.

Conclusion

My general feeling after NDC Porto 2022 is that we all want to be focused on people. We want to take care of our end users, but also of ourselves ? The main message was to make everyone feel welcome in IT. Especially after the pandemic, which increased anxiety and reduced the importance of social aspects in software development. I think programming conferences in 2022 should cover these topics.

Technical stuff is important – without that we can’t make anything. However, we are all people, and we need to take care of ourselves first, so all of those awesome tools can be used effectively and to everyone’s satisfaction ?

The post What Do People Talk About At Programming Conferences In 2022? appeared first on Yumasoft.

My last conference was the online Boiling Frogs event, which I attended remotely from Indonesia. As you could read here, I was generally happy with the sessions, but something was missing. This missing piece was community. A real one. Physical. The community you can touch. And talk to ? I didn’t even realize how much I missed that. Until I attended #NDCPorto 2022.

Firstly, Porto is an awesome city for an in-person conference. It offers a mild climate, especially by the end of April. The temperatures were around 24 Celsius degrees during the day. It also does offer wine, of course ? It all means that you can enjoy a technical event during the day and still have some fun and socializing in the evening.

I lived in Porto for 2 weeks in September 2020 and really loved the city. It’s charming, not overwhelming and very appealing. It’s also a students’ city, so you can feel that young vibe – lot of street bars, people drinking beers or wine starting late afternoon until very late night.

All right, let’s get to the point. NDC. This great, first in-person conference I attended since 2018. I will not talk about the sessions here. I will talk about the people.

I tried to list the most-talked-through topics from this conference. The only real conclusion I can make, is that everyone I talked to, at some point said “It’s so great to be back in person”, or something very similar. The pandemic has taken a lot from us. Now it’s time to get it back.

I didn’t realize it, but the remote work time made me a little anxious with talking to people ? I’m not talking about pandemic, because I was fortunate enough to spend most of it in Indonesia (yes, Yumasoft is fine with you working from another continent!). Before I started working remotely, I used to be a Team Leader. It made me talk to so many people at the office every day. I always thought I’m rather extrovert than introvert. However, I was very curious to see how it is to interact with people again.

Before going to NDC Porto, I promised myself I will be starting chats with random people. Especially that I was going alone and didn’t know anyone there (except a few of the speakers). At first, I felt a bit stressed to just chit-chat to random people at the conference ? But then, after I started talking with the first 1 or 2 people, it felt great. It was so awesome to exchange opinions. Not only on coding, but also on pandemic, remote work and everything it changed in our lives.

There was also a great opening keynote by Scott Hanselman. He covered few very important topics related to pandemic times. Scott mentioned burnout, anxiety and onboarding issues while working remotely. Of course, he also proposed few solutions everyone can implement quite easily. Just watch it yourself.

During the conference, I also attended two socializing events. The first one was a diner with wine tasting after the 1^st conference day. It was an additional event everyone could sign up to, but was not officially part of the agenda. I’m very happy I went there, as it was another chance to meet some great people, including few of the conference speakers. On the 2^nd day of the conference, there was an official NDC Party. Very well organized, again allowing for socializing and exchanging views on various topics. Not only software ?

Conclusion

My conclusion is that the online events will never be a substitute for in-person ones. They are just different. I don’t feel the community and interactions at online events. There might be a chat, but it’s not the same.

I encourage everyone to attend in-person events from time to time. It doesn’t need to be a big in-person conference in a foreign country like NDC is (although I definitely recommend that!). Look for local meetups in your city or smaller conferences in your own country. Go there and overcome your fears and anxiety about talking to people. Just do it – talk to random people you don’t know. You will feel awesome, believe me ?

Attending a conference not only makes me wanting to try 10 new frameworks which I will forget about in a week. It makes me feel that we have an awesome programming community. That we are not alone in what we do. That others face the same pains we all have, like impostor syndrome or feeling stagnated at work. I got to know that other developers are not magicians and geeky coders who don’t use StackOverflow. Not every programmer’s job is his/her hobby. They are just normal people like me, with their own pains and fears. And that is awesome! ?

The post How Does Attending An In-person Conference Feel After The Pandemic? appeared first on Yumasoft.