DevTeach Toronto 2013

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.