DevTeach
Toronto/Mississauga 2013 conference was presented on May 27-31.
I
had a chance to attend the main conference from May 28-30.
Generally
speaking, this was a very good event for developers. There
were a
lot of sessions covering agile, architecture, design, mobile,
SharePoint, database, etc. So we had a chance to contact a lot of
information. There were also some very good speakers, such as
Michael Stiefel, Steffan Surdek, Philip Japikse, Kathleen Dollard, just
to list a few.
I mostly attended architecture, agile, web
development sessions, and also listened some sessions from SQL,
JavaScript, mobile and Windows 8 series. I would say most of
them
are useful and informative. I want to specifically mention 2
sessions from Steffan
Surdek were really interesting.
Talking
about what should be presented in the conference and what shouldn't,
here is my 2 cents:
What I like:
What is the best practice when facing a common issue?
(design, architecture, agile)
What frameworks/libraries/tools the community uses in a production
environment? (test, mock, performance analysis)
What new technologies/trends are coming and in which areas
they can help?
What I don't like:
Commercial promotion for specific products
Obvious bias towards some products, but it's fine to have objective
comparison
I
often think about what really distinguishes a senior developer with an
architect. I had a chance to work closely with both
architects and senior developers. A good
senior developer can write beautiful code, solve complicated algorithm
issues, and fix tricky bugs. While
facing a problem, developer tries to use his own skill to resolve it,
but architect may seek existing frameworks and try to reuse them.
So at the end of the day, developers may write some code
repeatedly, whereas architect prefer to create their own framework or
use existing frameworks to resolve the problem. Architects
normally have a bigger vision.
From
different sessions, I had a chance to learn from experts, broaden my
knowledge, know what's going on in the community, and also find some
momentum to improve myself.
