That Conference 2014 Recap

Wow! Another fantastic That Conference experience.  This was my third time in a row going and I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out.  Some highlights:

• My first public talk!  I’ve been wanting to speak for years but the timing was always off or I procrastinated.  I spoke to a packed room about developing Hybrid Mobile apps, leveraging my experience building Fitwatchr.  The audience was very engaged, asking lots of questions both during and after my presentation.  I was nervous at first but had practiced extensively (about 10 times) so once I got going, I was in the zone and spoke fluidly.  I really enjoyed the experience and look forward to giving the talk again.  I plan to record a video of it, as well.  The biggest lesson learned is that it takes a lot more time then you’d think to put together a well made, focused, hour long talk.  I thought it would be hard to come up with 1 hour’s worth of material; quite the opposite, in fact! I had to cut out a bunch of content.  Overall, it took me about 30 hours of effort to plan, research, create, tweak, and practice my talk. I have a new found respect for speakers now!

• Kids activities: Each year, the number of full families that attend is noticeably increasing.  This is fantastic not for the water park aspect, but for the exposure to programming/development.  We have a severe lack of engineering/science graduates in the U.S., so getting children interested in science by bringing them along to Mom or Dad’s conference is a great way to remedy this.  This year, kids actually gave talks (and I thought it was cool that I gave one! ha!) and also had more adult-lead sessions to attend.  If I have kids someday, I will definitely be exposing them to programming.

• The talks: Quite heavily web, mobile, and JavaScript focused this year.  The best ones I attended were “Full Stack Web Performance” by Nik Molnar, “Black Art of Cryptography” by Robert Boedigheimer, and “Real World Data & Tactics for Touchscreen Design” by Steven Hoober.  The keynotes were also the best they’ve been in all 3 years; very inspiring!
• The experience: Between the opportunities this conference offers, to the community of amazing people, That Conference is such a joy to attend.  Every year I’ve been able to do something that has helped me grow professionally: in 2012 I won a hackathon, in 2013 I built software for charity, and this year I presented a talk.  Naturally, I’m looking forward to 2015!