Earlier this month on Friday, August 2, I attended my first developer conference. I had been looking for more learning opportunities and when I heard that there was going to be a conference somewhat local to me, I thought it would be a good experience for me to take part in. I could learn from multiple speakers on a variety of topics within a day. With only an hour for each talk, I knew I wasn't going to walk away with fully knowing a new skill or two but possibly I could take away enough to motivate me to seek out more information about some of them.
So I decided to attend the first JavaScript and Friends conference in Columbus, Ohio. JS&Friends is a not-for-profit conference that uses its proceeds to help cultivate the local (and remote) developer community in education and inclusivity. The schedule was packed with a lot of interesting talks about everything JavaScript - it was hard to choose which sessions to attend.
Starting the morning
Early Friday morning came and I was on the road to the Quest Conference Center off the far side of the loop (I-270 around Columbus). Arriving a bit early, the organizers let me know to help myself to breakfast while they get the attendee badges sorted. Great job on that, by the way! ποΈ Props to the fruit selection. I got my badge shortly after and waited for the welcome message to everyone before going to my first session. I made some notes on the session sheet they gave me for a possible plan of where to go. I still wasn't 100% sure which ones I was going to but was narrowing it down.
Below are summaries of the sessions I did attend. To trim down overall length of this post, I'll divide out the sections into their own DEV post.
Lunch Keynote - Guy Royse
During lunch, Guy gave a short informal talk on the linguistics of code, specifically how programming is mainly in English and how code routines would look if they were in another language, such as Spanish.
Not only changing the words but the sentence structure as well. He pointed out that our function calls also follow the English structure, i.e. noun.verb(object). He then showed us in detail how we could translate our a common FizzBuzz function into Latin
It was an amazing ride. I'd still like to see a framework coded in a Yoda-based structure (object(noun).verb ??).
Mentoring Panel & Closing
After the last session, JS&Friends hosted a panel of speakers who gave their insights and experiences on mentoring, answering questions from the rest of us. There were great questions and answers, unfortunately I cannot remember them in detail - I just know it was a good and helpful discussion. I was so focused on listening that I didn't take any notes.
In closing, my first developer conference was a very interesting experience and I am glad I was able to attend! I was able to hear a variety of topics discussed, networked a bit, learned a few things, and most importantly - I got out of my comfort zone of introversion, at least for a little bit. I hope to be at next year's JS&Friends Conference and any others that come along near me.
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