In August, several WellSky team members attended KCDC, Kansas City's annual developer conference. Reflecting the Midwest tech community that attends it, KCDC is a friendly and approachable conference that features workshops and talks spanning topics from JavaScript to QA to Security to DevOps to AI – even human skills. Here are some of the benefits of attending regional tech conferences, regardless of where you are at in your career.

1. Reach outside your role

A generalist conference like KCDC isn't likely to have a talk that will walk you through a specific technology issue you have at work, but the tradeoff is that they do offer breadth. With that breadth, you can build your empathy muscles and see what's happening in another silo. I attended workshops on process, QA, and even robotics! The talks on human skills are not to be missed, including one that discussed embracing failure as a learning opportunity, a lesson that is hard to swallow but is a game changer in a software career.

You can even choose not to attend talks at all – I heard about the KCWiT (Kansas City Women in Technology) room from a flyer and spent some time working the "hallway track" there (puzzle included).

2. Work the hallway track

The “hallway track" is a way to describe an informal but valuable way to interact at conferences: chatting people up in the hallway outside of a meeting room. Conferences are a uniquely fun social environment. Everyone there is the same kind of nerd you are, full of strong opinions, frustrations, but also hope that the conference will bring them something useful. This is a great time to say “hi" to a stranger, strike up a conversation about what's bothering them, and compare notes on if you can help each other out. I spent some time in a workshop talking to another attendee about tight deadlines and drawing process diagrams to brainstorm solutions for meeting them.

3. Go beyond the basics of tech

Of course, not all of the value from a tech conference is from socializing. You can also dive in and hear about new technical approaches. Here are a couple of coding tips I picked up at KCDC:

  • In a workshop about advanced TypeScript, I learned about the "never" keyword, which is used to indicate the type of values that should never occur. The use case for this type is generally for building dynamic types used in exception handling. This degree of strong typing squeezes the most value out of TypeScript by creating as much clarity in the code base as possible.
  • In a session covering flaky automated tests, I realized that in C#, the "async void" return signature is always a red flag. Functions with these class signatures can never be unit tested properly because there is no way to know when they have completed – their operations are asynchronous so there may be a delay, and they return void so no object can be awaited.

4. Spread your wings and present!

If you really want to get the most out of conferences, speaking is not to be overlooked. Two WellSky team members – Mary Creason and Russell Rutledge – presented this year at KCDC. Mary, a staff software engineer, shared about PubSub in GCP ("Pub/Sub in Practice: Building Real-Time Systems with GCP"). Russell, a senior engineering director, engaged the audience in a presentation about innersourcing ("Delivery at the Speed of Code with InnerSource"), plus a lightning talk about product ("Getting an Absolutely Shredded Product"). Not only do these talks give you an opportunity to dive into a topic and practice your presenting skills, but they also get you access to the private speaker room, rumored to be where some of the best conversations take place..

 

If you're looking for a different way to advance your career, I would definitely recommend giving KCDC a try!