My First CodeStock Experience

I’ve gone to few conferences lately since starting my software development career. I plan on going to several more as I find them throughout the year. Just recently, I decided to checkout CodeStock. Why go all the way to Knoxville, TN for a conference I’ve never been to before? Wintellect helped sponsor the conference and a few of the folks here had some sessions that were quite interesting. I wanted to help support my colleagues with their sessions and also to go to some of the other sessions to learn new things. There are two main reasons that I go to conferences. That is learning from each of the sessions as well as meeting and talking with other developers. CodeStock definitely had a lot of great sessions and came away with several new ideas and perspectives.

Sessions

CodeStock had a wide array of sessions, from functional programming to AngularJS to honing your soft skills. I tried to spread out in different areas as much as I could. I’m sure everyone who’s gone to a conference has experienced that there were too many sessions to go to at the same time. I do hope this is motivation for speakers to attempt to screencast their talks.

Of course, the go-to sessions were on Angular 2.0; it’s definitely good to get in early with this big of a framework and CodeStock had the sessions to help you do just that. A few of these sessions were by our own Josh Carroll and Dave Baskin.

There were also a few presentations on Xamarin for native cross-platform mobile applications by Wintellect’s own Keith Rome. He presented a couple of introductory sessions on Xamarin Forms. Of course, if you’d like to know more about what we do with Xamarin, feel free to reach out to us.

I also went to a couple of the functional programming sessions. Bryan Hunter definitely had an informative session on Lean and functional programming. Also, Aaron Erickson had a nice F# session that was, to my surprise, to a standing room. The best part of it was the discussion going on afterwards between Object Oriented Programming and Functional Programming.

Networking

Of course, being at a conference, it’s hard to not talk to other people around you. You already have something in common – you’re both developers! I find it interesting to find out where the folks I talk to are from and what they tend to specialize in. Just from talking to other developers you tend to gain an extra perspective and learn something new in the process.

Overall, CodeStock was a fun experience and I encourage all developers to try it out in 2016, especially from when voting starts for the sessions. Also, Knoxville is quite a fun town and there is no shortage of things to do there. Look for Wintellect there again in 2016 with a stronger presence!