Midwest GiveCamp and That Conference 2013 Recap

The 2^nd annual “That Conference” software development conference held in the Wisconsin Dells was a few weeks ago and I personally think it was even more successful than last year.  I met a lot of great people and attended some fantastic sessions.

This year I was able to come up to the Dells the weekend before the conference for Midwest GiveCamp.  I was fortunate enough to work with a great team on a web application for Humanitarian Toolbox, a newer charity focusing on disaster recovery via software solutions, building a system for tracking and assigning volunteers during disasters.  In less than 2 days, we built a fairly solid version 1.0 that I’m happy to say I contributed to and hope to continue contributing to.  Code is available on GitHub.  

Once again, there were a great variety of sessions available across 3 days.  Even given that there are high levels of .NET developers that show up, a wider range of topics was available this year.  Some notable ones that I attended:

• Dave Thomas keynote: Dave Thomas is one of the authors of my all-time favorite developer book, The Pragmatic Programmer, so I was very excited to see him speak.  His talk was solid, nothing groundbreaking but still interesting.  He spoke about fear, change, risk and stagnation.  A choice quote: “If things aren’t going wrong, you’re not trying hard enough!”
• Machine Learning: A well-known example of this is Netflix’s movie recommendation system.  Lots of math and theorems here.  I’m not sure just yet how I could apply to this to my work, but given the rise of “big data” lately I bet that this could become important to innovation efforts in the next few years.
• Elegant Precision of Targeted Actionable Language: A mouthful of a title, this session was about how to create easy to read, well written content in the context of app development.  One of my favorite sessions that left me with lots of material to follow up on.
• JavaScript talks: Angular.js, Backbone, JS error logging… the list goes on.  Once again JavaScript was a huge focus at That Conference – understandably so, given the rise of mature, stable frameworks that have become very popular. 
• DevOps:  I went to two sessions on this, one by Richard Campbell and one by a guy who works for Stack Exchange.  Campbell’s presentation gave a great overview of what DevOps is and the three steps to work on; lots of ideas to take back to work!
• Responsive Design: With the rise of mobile devices of all shapes and sizes, it was no surprise that this session was packed!  Definitely something developers across all industries need to get better at.  This is a topic that I believe will be huge in 2014 and beyond.
• .NET Rocks! 900th show: Carl and Richard recorded the 900th show of their hit podcast, this one “geek out” style on automated driving.  I was really excited for this as I cannot wait for automated cars to come in the next few years.  It was a fascinating discussion - the neatest takeaway was that laws are already in place for driverless vehicles and that driverless trucks will begin hitting highways in 2014.

Beyond the sessions, I really tried to meet even more people than last year.  Between GiveCamp and random conversations during lunch and in between sessions, this proved to be the most valuable portion of the conference.  Focusing for a few days solely on development and breaking away from the typical work week really helps energize and motivate me.  I always come away with new ideas that propel my work forward!

On a fun note, myself and a few others gathered at 6am each morning for what was dubbed “That5k” - a few mile run around the Kalahari resort.  Monday there was just a handful of us, but by Tuesday the group had doubled!  Nice to meet some fellow developers concerned with good health.

This year’s That Conference was absolutely stellar and I cannot recommend it enough. This has become the software development conference for the Midwest!