I have been attending CodeStock 2014 here in Knoxville the last few days with a group of my software and quality assurance engineers. Several were even speakers this year! Thanks to the conference organizers for putting together another great conference this year!
I did not plan to speak, but I got pulled into presenting a Lightning Talk. I gave an “Intro to Content Delivery Networks” Lighting Talk. I have given a much longer talk that delves into the Akamai CDN and how we use it and the many ways it is misunderstood. It was fun to do a shorter, more basic, introductory talk on CDN’s in general.
I want to congratulate Christine Jones on her first conference talk on “Intro to Android Development”. It was a nice way to remove some of the barriers to jumping in and doing your first application. I also want to congratulate Michael Phelps on his great talk on “There is no silver bullet: approaches to scaling agile and being a better team”. It was interesting to see how agile was used on such a large scale project with so many moving pieces as the Food Network website. I believe this was his first conference presentation as well.
Cory House @ OutlierDeveloper gave some food for thought in his Keynote “Becoming an Outlier” on why and how you should take your own path and stand out from typical developer. For those that find they are not passionate about their current job, how to reboot your career gives some paths to find your way out.
I wrapped up the conference by catching Michael Neel give his “The Quest for Fun” talk and I am glad I did. It came highly recommended by another developer. I would not normally have gone to a session on game design, but not only was it an interesting and engaging talk, but it did provide some insight into the website development that I typically oversee. While we do no build games, the fact that our websites are ad supported and must appeal to consumers that have other chooses means that some of the same thought that goes understanding your audience for game design also applies to our website development. It definitely provided some food for thought.
See you at CodeStock 2015!
great work