I survived [the flight to] Dev Days

And the flight back, for that matter.  For those of you who don't know, I am not much of a flyer.  Not sure exactly why, but I get nervous while 30,000 feet in the air.

However, sometimes, I have to get in to a plane and go somewhere.  Yesterday it was to attend the StackOverflow Dev Days conference in Toronto with Thomas.  I have to say, that I am very happy that  I went.  I learned something from each of the presentations, which I hope will make me a better software engineer in the future.  It's not that I think I am a horrible engineer right now, but I can always get better, and the day I feel I can't get any better, then I will have to switch jobs.  The previous statement is a paraphrasing of a quote that I agree with.  I'm just not sure who made the quote.

Anyways, on to the conference.  It had 7 presentations geared around software development.  For the most part, the presenters hit the mark on what they were talking about, and maintained my interest.  The only point in the day where I started to look for other things to do was when one of the presenters went through a coding example.  I don't mind coding examples, but please if you are going to present an example of  some code, don't write said code during the presentation.  The presentation bogs down while the presenter types away on a keyboard.   I can write code, and I can also read code, so if the example is written ahead of time, I feel the presentation of the example will go along a little smoother.  All you need to do in the coding example is point out the parts that are important to your presentation.

All in all, I had a great time at the conference, and I came away with a lot of stuff to think about during my day to day routines as a developer, which I will comment on in my next couple of posts.  In the end, I hope that this experience will help me become a better engineer.  I would like to thank Crank for providing me with the opportunity to attend the conference.  We are down to crunch time with our Storyboard product, and every hour is precious, so allowing me to be gone for a whole day is really big.  So big in fact, that I was willing to fly.