Recap of the HDC2015 conference
I had a very unique experience at the http://heartlanddc.com conference at Omaha. This is my first experience as a speaker and hence also first conference in which I dindn’t have to pay for registration or the hotel. This is a big crowd about 600 people attended!
I didn’t know a single company of about 15 companies that have a booth over there but they all seem pretty stable and actively hiring. Good to know that developers are in demand everywhere in the country.
This is also my first time in midwest and the vibe of developers around here is pretty different. To best summarize the culture around here -
about 80% of the people raised their hands for mid curve (.NET, JAVA, Ruby,PHP) when asked about their technology curve and only 2 for leading edge
There Cory pointed out in his excellent presentation, there is nothing wrong with that, its just not the same kind of crowd you see in CA/WA. The folks around here seem friendly enough.
The quality of the keynotes and breakout sessions is pretty decent. They all seem to be concentrated on .NET/Microsoft stack. But note that this is a $250 conference and in mid-west, so it caters to the local dev market and what they want to learn. To be fair, I am too preoccupied with my own presentation and couldn’t attend quite a few sessions. I missed about half of the conference.
Another stark standout is there is not a single QA/Tester in the conference (or atleast in the session that question was asked) and the few people I spoke with. And other than my talk on mobile, there isnt any other mobile mention.
Mesh party was awesome probably the highlight of the conference for many folks. Many of the speakers, who knew each other hung out at the party for a long time, other played bowling and goofed off in the arcade. But overall I was seeing a lot of interaction.
Now a brief run down on the sessions that I attended.
The Importance of Data and Beautiful User Experiences: This is the first Keynote, Shen Chauhan had eloquence and charisma. HIs presentation and use of media was excellent, he drove the point of using data for measuring user experience but his constant demeaning of his wife and her driving made me uncomfortable. His self comparision with Nadella, Indian origin and belittling women, portrayed the chauvinist desi male. 5/10
Typescript 101: I’ve learned quite a few things during this session. I only briefly seen TypeScript before and I could see why it could be appealing to .NET/Java devs. The presenter, has good knowledge on the topic, was able to answer questions and work out of a problem that came during the demo. 7/10
Real Agile: Stories From the Trenches: Lee Brandt is a character, can easily be a stand up comedian. From the moment he started the talk to the end, all the attendees are engaged, entertained and educated. He speaks from experience and fluent at that. He made quite a few good observations and one that I am deeply affected with in our agile org. 9/10
Swagger — 2.0: enlightened me and enhanced my understanding of API world. He went deep into swagger what it is and the tools and ecosystem around it. Bonus points for mentioning both @postman and @runscope and more bonus points for giving me a plethora of material for my next talk. He seemed a novice speaker(like me) and at times felt that he is reading out from his notes. Not that his notes isn’t useful but its not engaging. 7/10
Joe Olsen: This guy is a CEO — seems to have a lot of personal connection with the conference and the local dev community. He has been organizing this conference for 15 years and obviously has a personal meaning for him. His talk was a lot of stories and he was able to connect with the audience. His main message can be summarized to a slide but the way he used key terms and attacked that message from various angles is a demonstartion of a good presentation. 8/10
Owning the technology adoption curve: Cory house seems to the guy around this conference. All the MVP’s are hovering around him, he had 3 breakout talks! And attendees were swooning over him after the talk. And I would say rightly so. His presentation skill is excellent, he engaged audience, he had excellent points to talk about. As an aside the only reason that I knew about this conference and applied for speaker is from one of his tweets. 9/10 only because all this content is not original but from Pragmatic Programmer and he could have given them some credit.
What is Mobile First, how do you develop and test it: Well this is my talk, so obviously I will be biased. But overall I think attendees got the primary message of the talk. There are times when I felt that I was too fast and only talking. But I didn’t know how to engage the audience. I would rate it 7/10.
