NCDevCon 2017 Recap

NCDevCon 2017 wrapped up last week and was another great success! I know I’ve said this before, but NCDevCon really is a great not-to-miss conference!  The price, location, weekend schedule and amazing content all make it an obvious event to schedule every year.  2017 was no exception.

Both of my talks (“Even More HTML5” and “Best Practices Are Best Except When They’re Not”) received a lot of positive feedback, I’m glad everyone enjoyed them. Thanks to everyone for asking questions during each session; because of you I’ve got several updates to each preso for the next time I give them.

As always, the conference was held at Centennial Campus which always comes with easy parking, no crowds, no traffic, a clean and safe environment for everyone. Breakfast, snacks, lunch, and the evening event all had the same calibre of food we usually see at NCDevCon.  

My one “critique” is always that I wish the conference were walking distance from the hotels, but I understand that is cost prohibitive.  And as long as attendees do a little checking on Twitter, you can usually share a ride with someone pretty easily.

The Adobe Keynote was given by Rakshith and was a new “ColdFusion Mythbusters” talk, rather than the previous ones we’ve seen a lot that focus more on the API Manager.  Lots of very informative data about CF and its place in the market, upcoming events such as CF Summit and other features coming in future versions of the language. (Plus we finally saw another glimpse of that CF Fiddle app mentioned 2 years ago at CF Summit -- hopefully that gets launched soon!)

The best talk for me was Jessica Kennedy’s “Micro SPA Architecture - The Journey so Far”.  Honestly I’d misread the title (I blame the jetlag) and thought it was a talk on micro services. Best mistake I made all weekend! :) I love when I leave a preso motivated enough to immediately start coding with a new language/tool/pattern. That was Jessica’s talk for me.  It really opened my eyes to some great new ideas for several upcoming projects.  Jessica always does a great job, she’s been my favorite speaker at several conferences over the last few years.

Other highlights included:

• Lots of great Vue.JS, Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and NativeScript presos.  These were all things high on my “to learn more about” list and NCDevCon provided several great presentations on each.
• Mark Drew’s talk on GraphQL. I’m bias, Mark and I work pretty closely together on a lot of projects, but he always does a great job mixing humour and useful info into well put together presentations.
• Terrance Smith’s talk on building Alexa skills was great.  I especially liked his demo of a “real world, non entertainment related” use of an Alexa skill, and how it can be used to save lives. Very inspiring!
• And of course the impromptu speakers dinner at The Big Easy. It was great hanging out with everyone; I haven’t laughed that hard in ages! Worth the cross-country flight all by itself. :)

Seriously, I know it can be tough to find time to attend conferences. They’re often expensive, require taking time off work, you can’t decide which sessions to attend, etc.  As objective as I can be, NCDevCon solves a lot of those problems. Tickets are 200 bucks; it’s a weekend (even from the west coast, I can take a 2pm flight on Friday and a 6pm flight home on Sunday night, missing only a half day of work); they record all the presentations so you don’t miss anything.  Whether you’re writing mobile apps, server side development, doing a bit of both and some DevOps, there is enough at NCDevCon to make attending worth your time.

See you all next year!

-nolan