When I started following @OctopusDeploy on twitter in preparation for adopting it for Redacted Financial Services Inc., I saw that they were sending representatives to the Kansas City Developer’s Conference (@kc_dc, #kcdc16). I looked up the conference and saw that @jeffreypalermo was going to be there as well. Excited, I reached out to @darrencauthon to see if he would be there too. When I got the confirmation, I’d made up my mind to go.

Living in the Northwest, I’d never heard of this conference. I’m super glad I came. There 1600 people at the conference. The topics’ focus are a little .NET centric but range toward the philosophical as well as the technical. In addition to .NET, there are presentations on R, Ruby, Javascript, leadership, etc.. The keynote encouraged attendees to learn more deeply about something they’re already doing and also learn something completely new.

This is exactly what I was wishing for in a conference. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to talk with the gentlemen at @OctopusDeploy. I was impressed by the quality of Jeffrey Palermo’s talk about Continuous Delivery. I greatly enjoyed hearing about new technologies such as Semantic UI. I was fascinated by the differences between Angular, Ember, Knockout, and ReactJS. I’m now very interesting in trying out React.

The highlight was meeting Darren Cauthon in person after 5 years of being twitter friends. Darren & I are kindred spirits in that we both believe in TDD and strive for quality, well-crafted code. We both have backgrounds in .NET and experience with Ruby (though his experience with Ruby is far superior to mine).

I’ll come to this conference again–perhaps as a speaker next time.