wolfgang ziegler

„make stuff and blog about it“

WeAreDevelopers - The Good Parts

May 12, 2017
Conference Web Dev

Yesterday's blog post about the first day of the WeAreDevelopers conference was healthy for me to vent all the frustration and anger that had piled up during that day.

But after having let off that steam and slept over it, I decided to give this conference another chance and start that day with as little prejudice and hard feelings as possible. This turned out to be the right attitude and approach, because that second day's experience - while not perfect - was way better.

I even managed to grab my first cup of coffee (yay!) at this conference that morning since attendance was still low and no queues had formed yet. So, off to a really good start ...

Then that happened ...

One of the conference organizers approached my over Twitter asking did I have a couple of minutes to talk. He had probably read my previous day' s blog post. "Am I going to be kicked out?" was my first response. Somebody even feared about my well-being ;-)

Of course, nothing like that happened and we had a very open and respectful conversation. He was genuinely open and honest about the overbooking situation and handled the whole conversation really professionally. It always helps to talk to actual people and it's way harder to be angry at those people than some abstract concept of conference organizers. So that conversation left me in an even better mood and even more determined to focus on the positive aspects of that event.

And there were quite a few that day.

Håkon Wium Lie the inventor of CSS talking about his "child" was definitely a highlight.

Håkon Wium Lie talking about his creation

The following Main Stage tracks centered around the topics of CSS and JavaScript were also quite entertaining and informative.

Paint the Web by Eva Lettner was one of the best sessions of the conference. She's a great speaker and the theme of doing "artsy" things with code is something I always enjoy watching. Follow her on Twitter @eva_trostlos and check out the cool stuff she is doing.

Eva Lettner coding CSS Art

Another really impressive session that day was by Rasmus Lerdorf (@rasmus) the guy who invented PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP

Finally, Joel Spolsky's talk was a really good finale of this conference, which left me with a completely different impression that second day.

Joel Spolsky

Bottom Line

So it turned out to be two rather different conference days at WeAreDevelopers for me. Obviously attitude changes a lot. On day two, I had accepted that fact that it would be crowdy and hot and focused on the positive things. The conversation with the conference organizers had also helped a lot: seeing the actual people behind the scenes and their efforts puts many things into perspective.