Nodevember experience

Kris: I think the most value I get out of any team travel is taking the opportunity to get to know each other better and challenge one another. We seem to learn more as a group by absorbing ideas from folks at a conference who have different perspectives.

Some of the talks challenged our thinking about how we are building our platform and our product at Odd Networks. Other talks confirmed that we seem to be doing most things correctly, and not by dumb luck.

Blain: When I attend these conferences I always go because of the people. They are what make the experience worthwhile and this time was no exception. I was particularly excited to actually meet Wyatt Pruel, who has, arguable, the most sought after GitHub name on the whole site. He is core maintainer on the Node.js microservices framework, Seneca.js, that we use at Odd Networks for all of our microservice needs. We have spoken a few times on Gitter.im, but it was great to hear his talk and see him in person.

The best part was chatting with him after and setting up a plan to chat again to hopefully contribute to Seneca.js as an organization.

Lots of stuff to put into practice when I got home, but more importantly I connected with people for the first time I would have only talked with online.

Also, everyone needs to try an Almond Milk Latte with vanilla and cinnamon! You can thank The Well Coffeehouse for that one. It is called the “fireside”. \m/

Barth: BBQ, live music, and node. We got a full dose of the three in Nashville. Overdog welcomed us with a feast on Friday. The meal was made to perfection. Saturday most of us got up in time to make it to the conference for some delicious jalapeno pancakes. After adding five new shirts to my wardrobe in the lobby from sponsors, I got to listen to a lot of great talks.

I felt like the guys that built the Odd API could have given the talks on microservices and scaling APIs cause it seemed like everything I heard we are doing.

Sunday I was captivated by a talk on React Native, where I met the iOS dev who posted the only blog post I had read on an iOS developer going all in on React Native. Now I want to learn it. After watching somebody program the AI for a game of tic tac toe, it was time to head back home to Upstate New York.

Matt: This was the first time I’ve been to Nashville, and the city did not disappoint. From the food, to the people, to the atmosphere, Nodevember was an incredible trip. Getting to know our team better over the weekend was the best experience for me.

I loved learning more about everything we all do in our projects that contribute back to the core mission for Odd Networks, and hearing talks at the conference that validate we’re moving forward in all the right ways. I left Nodevember excited and wanting to learn more, especially about incorporating ES6 into our projects and using React Native. 10/10 would go again.

Chief: I know people cmplain about diversity in tech, but I felt like I saw and talked to lots of different kinds of people. I’m sure things could be more diverse, but compared to some other conferences I’ve been to, it was nice to see. Some of the talks centered around this subject or mentioned it (@getify’s #whiteprivledge note caused some attendees to flee the auditorium).

Erik: Nodevember’s format seems to be of the “go big or go home” sort. There was a lot of variety in the talks and speakers and it was a bit overwhelming to choose where to go next with four tracks. The talks were all a half hour long, so there wasn’t really too much time to dig deep, but there seemed to be a good balance between intro-level and higher-level content, which is always great.

I love going into a talk and having the feeling like the concepts are way over my head. I like knowing what I don’t know.

Erik has a bigger post; you should all check it out here. He also recommended his favourite talks of the weekend, and you can find them at the end of this post.

Dan: I really liked the diversity of the of the presentations. It was great seeing so many intelligent, passionate programmers speak about topics they have a lot of experience in. Jeff Barczewski’s presentation on using Redis and hapi for microservices was very informative and almost had a hands-on feel. I had never thought of using JavaScript for anything but back-end services, but Kelly King changed my perspective. She used it to build physical games, like Simon. Kyle Simpson talked about his remote CSP library, which was a great example of just how flexible JavaScript is as a language.

I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Boston’s presentation “ClojureScript Made Easy”. He showed a number of examples where immutability can simplify code and help you to avoid a lot of common errors. Being a big fan of clojure, and after his presentation, I’m going to have to learn clojurescript.

I left the conference with exactly what I had hoped for: a better understanding of JavaScript, new goals for the future, and an overall good experience.

Nodevember sounds like a great time, doesn’t it? Wish we could all be there to enjoy it together; but for now, we can live vicariously through our team’s colorful recap.

Kris summed it up perfectly:

Our company is committed to sending each person to one conference a year fully paid for. It might seem like a trivial thing, but I think these conferences have contributed immensely to strengthening our team. We get to learn from other perspectives given by other teams in our industry, we confirm our past mistakes and current direction, and we build bonds that help our problem solving skills back home.

It’s a win — win — win.

Hopefully see you next year, Nodevember. Thanks for showing Odd guys a good time.