Yesterday I attended the Northeast Wisconsin Code Camp in Appleton, Wisconsin. Appleton is about a three and a half hour drive from my home. I attend conferences to socialize, and network, with other developers. I also attend to be exposed to technologies that I may, or may not, use in the future. This was my first time attending this conference and this year was a fairly small attendence count, but it was a good experience none-the-less.

Network, Network, Network

As I have said before in previous posts, networking is very important. Getting introduced to new people can be a great way to farther your career. Who knows who you might meet at a conference. There was only a couple people at the conference that I knew, so talking to people I don’t know is pretty easy. Also interacting with the speakers is also a great idea. They could be hiring!

Talks

I don’t usually take a ton of notes at conferences, I just jot down quick ideas or the speakers twitter handle is anything. They could be posting some cool or interesting things on Twitter.

9 a.m.

I attended “IoT Systems with Predictable Maintainance Notifications” by Min & Lwin Maung at 9AM. I have seen these guys in the past and they usually put on an interesting presentation. This presentation was on machine learning. I didn’t get much for notes, just jotted down the website they were using, customvision.ai.

10:15 a.m.

I attended the session “How to go from 10 seconds to 500ms using message driven architecture and RabbitMQ” by Justin Fisher (@jfnkoded). He was using C# with Mass Transit.

Lunch (Pizza)

At lunch, set with a guy who told me about an app called “Sololearn” it is available on Android and iOS, it is used for short quick learning of a programming language.

12:30 p.m.

Attended “Tips on Docker and other dev tools” by Jason Gegere (@gegere), he posted his github repo with an example docker php image he built and uses for development and production at htmlgraphic. https://github.com/htmlgraphic/Apache

1:45 p.m.

I attended “Cloud Ranching with Terraform” by Jon Cwiak (@binaryjanitor). He posted a link to his slide deck at tinyurl.com/cloudranching.

3 p.m.

I attended “From Cmdlet to Function – A Beginners’ Guide to PowerShell” by Mike Nelson.

Conclusion

I attended all the talks that appealed to me, asked questions if I needed clarification on something the user mentioned and posted on twitter tagging the speaker thanking them for their talk (when I remembered to do it hahaha). Overall I had a good time at the conference, and will do my best to attend next year.