Software Engineering Conference 101

Today I was honored to be a presenter at the Software Engineering 101 Conference organized by Jim Holmes in Columbus OH. This was a great little conference idea put together and organized by Jim as a way to get back to some of the basics people need to know about developing good software. There were sessions on things such as OOP, SOLID, TDD, and of course my talk on debugging.

The great thing that set this conference apart for me from many others I've attended in recent memory was that there was a very high degree of new faces in attendance. I attend a fair amount of events and so have come to at least be familiar with a lot of people in this region so I was surprised by this. The same sentiment was echoed by my fellow speakers who all agreed with me that this is a great thing! These are exactly the people we want to be reaching out to as speakers and helping to learn new and cool things that they can then take back and share with their coworkers and peers.

I can't claim to know everyone's thoughts on the subject, but for me that is the reward I feel from giving back to the community through speaking... The sense that maybe I served as the spark that started a fire that will continue to grow and spread carrying good engineering practices with it. The more we all pitch in to educate each other, the better all of our lives are going to be.

Slides for the talk can be found here. These are the Devlink specific version, but 99% of the content was the same I talked about today.