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. 

DevTeach 2010 Toronto

DevTeach 2010 Toronto is held in Microsoft headquarter in Mississauga on Mar 8-12.  The main conference is from Mar 9 to Mar 11, plus one day pre conference workshop and one day post conference workshop.  The main conference attendees are eligible for one year MSDN subscription.  That is probably why so many people attended the conference.

Comparing to TechDays, the sessions in DevTeach are more advanced.  These sessions cover architecture, agile, silverlight, sharepoint, and general web and Windows development. I took the main conference and pre conference workshop.  I don't think the pre one deserves the cost ($400 one day).  The Silverlight workshop I took only simply shows a series of sessions which we probably already knew in some previous Techdays sessions.  Plus the organizing is not professional.

I like the main conference.  The presenters impressing me include Michael Stiefel, Kimberly Tripp, Donald Belcham, etc.  Some architecture sessions are very attractive, most of which are related with interface, layer, design pattern, design principle, and ORM.  A couple of SQL sessions from Kimberly Tripp are outstanding.  I also took some sessions which focus on particular fields, such as jQuery, LINQ, SharePoint, and Web farm. 

It's beneficial and important to know what the people in the community are thinking and doing.  When you listen to people, you can refresh your memory and probably come out some new ideas.  I hope this conference experience can help improve our in-house WPF and Silverlight projects.