Go to (developer) conferences!

Yay! My first blog(?) post! …or wait. It seems everyone has a blog now… maybe one more won’t hurt?

To avoid this becoming too meta, let’s just dive in.

What I actually wanted to write about is that something like a month ago I went to my first proper software developer conference.

And it was great!

The conference I went to was NgVikings in Copenhagen featuring great speakers like: John Papa, Deborah Kurata, Matt Podwysocki, Dominic Elm, Uri Shaked and Urigo (Uri Goldshtein).

…and just a few days ago I went to another one! GraphQL conf at Berlin! Which featured even better (if possible) speakers like: Dan Schafer, Sashko Stubailo, Sasha Solomon, Tim Griesser, Adam D. I. Kramer, Andreas Marek and Lee Byron. Just to mention many.

What did I learn? First of all I learned I should have gone to a developer conference way earlier, and definitely feel like I’ve been missing out the past few years. Another thing I learned is that going to conferences is a great way to improve as a developer.

Even if you have great colleagues, and your work and company culture drive for improvement; it is still easy to get stuck on your own way of doing things. Once you’ve found a way that works for you. Developers working in the same company culture, and perhaps coming from the same universities and background cultures, all drive for the fact that it is quite likely that you and your colleagues will see many things in a similar fashion.

By going to international developer events you actually get different views and backgrounds clashing. In a positive way.

So what actually happened on those developer conferences where I went to.

NgVikings:

I have a quite strong background from Angular since I’ve been using it at work since Angular 2 beta, so for more than 3 years before I went to the conference.

The conference was great, I got to talk to very interesting people, the talks were good.

…but most of the things covered I already somewhat knew, even if they were really good memory refreshers. Except for talk by Dominic Elm and Uri Shaked about machine learning which was interesting and extremely fun, though currently I am not actively planning to start learning about machine learning deeply.

The one talk that really gave me an epiphany was Uri Goldshtein’s talk about GraphQL… I was just blown away when I realised what I had been missing out for years. I’d seen GraphQL mentioned a few times online, but quite no-one in my “developer circle” was talking about GraphQL, and you see so many buzz-terms now-a-days that I just completely missed it.

But no more.

After the talk I immediately went with a dozen or so people from the talk to talk with Uri in “meet your heroes”-session, where he really patiently talked more in-depth about how GraphQL has a potential to solve a lot of really, really common pain points in front-end development.

And I was in love. Pretty much couldn’t think about much more than GraphQL for the next few days.

Then I noticed that GraphQL conf was about to happen in Berlin and I just had to get there.

I had a few weeks to prepare for GraphQL conf in Berlin, and I’ve got to confess that I did not prepare as well as I would have liked to have. Life happens. But I kept reading a lot and thinking a lot about GraphQL, even though I didn’t manage to make time to actually test it out as much as I would have liked. But you make do with what you have, and off to Berlin I was.

GraphQL conf:

It was amazing.

Amazing speeches from many (even opposing) perspectives, a lot of informal conversations with people who had different views on the best way to go about GraphQL; should one do Schema-first (which I initially thought was the only way to go about it) or code-first. When does Schema-stitching and “one Graph” really make sense, and many many other things which I am currently unable to mention here in a coherent way.

I don’t have a definite answer for myself on those matters yet. However I can say I was a sponge trying to leech everyone I had a chance to talk to from their experience and knowledge. And now that I have had this opportunity, all these wonderful people tell me their perspective on the matter, I have to find my own truth.

One thing is for certain: any way you do it GraphQL is great, and go to conferences, it will change your developer life for better!

Disclaimer: I know I said two things there.

Eagerly waiting for the next great conference opportunity,

Toni Vaakanainen.