Peers Conference April 26-28th

The skillful journey was about to begin. It all started around 6:07 pm on lovely Tuesday evening April 25th when I reached Dayton airport from home via Serve'em taxi services. I found out that gates to enter the air plane were about to be closed in 10 minutes. That left my desire to check-in bag to be a dream. Rather than thinking about being comfortable, I gave more priority to somehow get on board in 10 minutes including security, rushing to the gate, checking in and finally inserting self in the American Airlines flight. It was a record time for me to get in flight in less than 10 minutes. Finally I was inside the flight by 6:16 pm. I learnt to be always prepared for uncertainty while traveling in general. My reactivity to the situation was thoroughly tested.

I had break journey in DFW before I reached Seattle Tacoma airport by 12:45 am and was waiting for the Shuttle express to take me to the Fairmont Olympic hotel (never heard of this hotel before). I reached in the hotel by 1:10 am.

                                                                Day 1: April 26th

I woke up early morning around 5:35 am to check out the venue for the morning and evening workshops in the conference website. It was 25 minutes walk as opposed to 9 minutes which I presumed. I was good in time to incorporate that cloudy morning walk in Impact Hub with peers.

I got the feeling that this conference is general peers talk where there are no dedicated speakers. I soon discovered that my prenotion was a fallacy. That day lunch was provided by peers and evening had to manage on my own by visiting nearby Chipotle.

Workshops Speakers: 

9:30 am to 12:30 pm: Craft 3 CMS workshop by Brandon Kelly and Creating a living style guide by Adrianna De La Cuadra

We got introduced to the CMS(content management system) called Craft 3. It highlighted 10 major benefits which can help you to manage content using Craft 3 and its advantages compared to Craft 2.
I learnt about the SGDD(Style Guide Driven Development) and how it can be used to document a living style guide.


1:30 pm to 4:30 pm: Pain points, Pricing and Pipelines | Addressing the Perpetual woes of the small business.

It was a general talk with 5 members in the panel. Everyone discussed pain points they have in their organization. Later, there was informal discussion between audience and the panel with a goal to reduce the pain points by hearing different experiences.

Day 2: April 27th 

Day 2 was all captured by Seattle Arts Museum where we had all of our sessions in 2 auditorium halls. As soon as we entered the museum, first thing we did was collected our badges and the awesome tees. The unique thing about the badge: it had the year number inscribed in it based on your attendance in Peers conference.

The museum authority was so kind to give all attendees a free ticket to explore different kinds of art forms present in the building. Afternoon we had peers sponsored sandwich lunch at Delicatas. After lunch, I went to view arts collection(majority of them were from African origin) with couple of other peers. We enjoyed talks from 5 speakers all through the day starting from 10:00 am until 5:00 pm. Jimmy Johns came to the rescue in the evening for a vegetable sandwich.

Speakers:

1) 10:00 am to 11:00 am: Server Admin for Web Developers by Viraj Khatavkar

We got introduced to 3 different quadrants

1. Known knowns: things we know that we know.
2. Known unknowns: things that we know we dont know.
3. Unknown unknowns: things we dont know we dont know.

The talk went into things that annoy developers about servers and how they can be managed effectively. It was a good focus on how to manage security, permissions, ACL, Process Monitoring and Log Management using unix commands.

2) 11:00 am to 12:00 pm: Actionable Advice for Moving Faster as Front-end Engineer by Saimon Sharif

Coming shortly....

3) 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm: Content - First Websites from Theory to reality by Carrie Hane

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth

Content: anything on the web page other than code. text, images, audio, video, document files. How can you make the web better by introducing content first instead of it being last? Design in the absence of content is not design but it is mere decoration. Speaker went through the content model and the whole content strategy.

4) 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm: Automating documentation on JavaScript projects by Marcus Iglesias

It was a great insight on how to incorporate documentation which does not go out of date for your code. It started with automating documentation for JavaScript projects but it would be a great idea if we can standardize documentation library in our own corporate settings.

5) 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm: Debugging your Feelings: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Developers by Jamie Strachan

Our responses are based on the experiences which triggers our thoughts. Responses are the outputs, Experiences are the inputs and Thoughts is the code. Do not trust your feelings, test your feelings.
Steps: Test your feelings, Get your thoughts out of your head(on sheet of paper by having two columns : Automatic thoughts and Rational thoughts) and finally Get help.

Day 3: April 28th

Day 3 morning started pretty late around 10:00 am. I dined in Kastoori Grill for Indian Buffet nearby to the sea. We had total of 6 talks and the evening was pretty special. Let me get back to special evening a little later.

Speakers:

1) 10:30 am to 11:30 am: It won't be a straight line by Garrett Dimon

Coming shortly....

2) 11:30 am to 12:30 pm: Technology's Role in 21st Century Humanitarian Leadership by Sabrina Hersi Issa

Coming shortly......

3) 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm: How complexity theory can save your job? by Rob Conery

Coming shortly......

4) 3:00 pm to 3:45 pm: Marketing for Developers by Tracy Osborn

What to do to get your project seen? The talk was on various marketing tactics to get more visibility on your project. I also learnt how to find and share among relevant communities about your project. It also touch based on marketing using social media, blogging and strategies to keep in mind while marketing.

5) 4:00 pm to 4:45 pm: Overcoming the Challenges of Mentoring by Kim Crayton

Goal of this talk was to understand the difference between youth, adult, personal and professional mentoring. I learnt what mentoring is, what it is not and different factors for effective mentorship.

6) 4:45 pm to 5:30 pm: How Math and Star Trek Explain the Value of Team Diversity by Fredric Mitchell

The speaker took example of the star trek voyager crew to help us understand the value of team diversity. There was mention between correlation between IQ and EQ and how having homogenous team is not good in problem solving.

In the evening, I got the opportunity to visit the Columbia center around 6:10 pm which is the tallest building in west coast. It is twice as huge as size of the needle(for those who know about it). Needle has Americas first rotating restaurant. Evening was blossomed by having the Sky View observatory from 73rd floor of Columbia center building. The view was fantastic and was able to capture as much as I can in my camera considering space and size limitations.

Day 4: 29th April

The morning started early around 12:34 am to get ready for the shuttle to take off from the Fairmont Olympic hotel to Seattle airport. Everything was good except when I found out that the incidentals were charged for consuming the breakfast available in the hotel room. Caution: In any big hotel, always make sure what gets covered in the incidentals. It was luxury staying in Fairmont Olympic hotel but it always comes with excess baggage of extra costs. All connecting flights were on time starting from early morning United airlines flight departing around 5:30 am. Only big change was the weather. When I left off Seattle, it was around 35F and was very cold and cloudy. By the time I reached Denver, it was snowing very heavily and temperature was very freezing. At last it was a big relief after reaching Ohio where it was all sunny and warm weather until I realized it rained very heavily last evening. I am glad to be back home after memorable 3 days in Seattle conference.