So, for the last week I was at Dev8D, a happy event (with an even happier logo) that is otherwise known as “JISC Developer Days”. It took a surprising mind-shift to think of Dev8D as not being a conference. It’s not quite an unconference (or at least not as I think of them), being generously backed by the lovely geek-feeders at JISC, though it does have many of the self-organizing hallmarks. The thing that took me the longest time to adjust to, that I find common at regular conferences, was that I didn’t need to feel guilty if I didn’t get to every workshop.
You see, the workshops and tutorials were all amazing: I have new-found knowledge of Clojure, Objective C, AWS, and all sorts of other things, not to mention a yearning to apply the coding dojo technique more prevalently. But breaking away from the schedule revealed a whole seam of rich knowledge. Getting time to chat to other coders, to work on little projects, to see what nifty things were being produced – this was what I found incredibly useful. Software development is such a huge area that it’s often overwhelming – language choice alone is boggling sometimes – and knowing how people have fared against hurdles in the past is invaluable. Standing on the shoulders of giants, or even just peering over the shoulders of colleagues, is essential in our field.
So now it’s the day after Dev8D and I’ve actually taken a day to de-geek: to write down all the inspiration that appeared before I forget it and get some of the links and articles stored away to read over the coming weeks. I’m going to get vim set up to do autocompletion; have a play with the Memento APIs to see if they can be hooked into TechTales; dig through some of the tweets for any links I may have missed; come up with a project for my Arduino; and see if I can get some small projects open sourced, so I can let developers peer over my shoulders a little, too. Thanks to everyone who put on such a great event!