15 Apr 2015

POSSCON Report

Day 1

Definitely my favorite day, all of the talks I went to were interesting, and at some times it was hard to pick just one. My favorite talks were probably the Vagrant and Docker sessions, as I used both of those tools and was interested in learning more.

I didn’t actually approach any of the people I listed in the previous blog, but I did talk to a few of the speakers after their session if I had a question. I also met Chad Cravens during lunch and we had some discussions about C++, build systems and high frequency trading.

Day 2

I liked the separate workshop format, it was an interesting change from the typical 45 minute sessions.

Advanced Github talk was a bit disappointing, I had hoped that Advanced would assume some prior knowledge and get into more detail regarding complicated workflow and lesser known tips/tricks. Instead he spent about 2 hours covering basics (which he did a good job of). I appreciated that he went into important details and discussed things to keep in mind regarding git-workflow.

Regarding commits,pulls,merges etc, he spent a lot of time focusing on the GUI, but I think switching between explaining it in terminal and GUI interrupted the flow of it and I would have personally preferred that he focused on terminal as I believe it facilitates better understanding of the process.

All the good stuff was at the end. The last 30 minutes was much more relevant to my interests. I was happy to learn about stash and to hear more about rebase and its benefits/drawbacks.

I was also interested to hear about Webhooks - I was previously unaware how Github managed integration with CI, even though I’d seen it in use. Would’ve also liked to hear a bit more about the API.

Overall the workshop was great, if not exactly what I was hoping for.

For the second workshop I chose AngularJS. It was a bit of a slow start, as several people had difficulty following Tom, but once everyone got on the same page we progressed nicely through building an application that could add, edit and remove items from a list – with data stored using PouchDB.

Overall

I had a great time at POSSCON and am super grateful for the opportunity to go. It was very well organized and had approachable content. I hope that I’ll be down in the Charleston area next year so I can attend again!

Laura Barber at 11:20AM