CodeStock 2017
At the beginning of this month I attended CodeStock in Knoxville, TN. This was my second year of attending and the 10th anniversary of the conference. There were so many great talks on the schedule that I wanted to attend, but with nearly a hundred sessions over two days that just isn’t possible. These are just the highlights from a few of the ones I was able to see.
The event started out on Friday with a keynote Hadi Hariri from JetBrains about the silver bullet syndrome. The talk takes the audience on a humorous journey through technologies that were supposed to solve all of our problems, but yet now we have moved on and don’t view them so favorably anymore.
As we all know, many people in technology (like myself) tend to not be overly social. Jeremy Clark gave some tips for becoming a social developer and pointed out the differences in being shy and introverted. He also pointed out some helpful tips for meeting other developers. Most of them are especially useful at conferences.
Developers love to talk but they don't like to start the conversation.
Chris Keathley gave us some pointers on becoming a pro at git. During the talk he pointed out many useful git commands to improve your workflow. Plus he told us the golden rule for using git: Don’t Panic. If you don’t panic you can fix 100% of problems you encounter with git.
The awesome content continued on Saturday with Jared Smith giving an introduction to forensic analysis. His talk was an live demo of using various forensic analysis tools to examine a machine infected with stuxnet. While day-to-day I am not likely to find myself analyzing malware it was definitely interesting to learn about tools and techniques involved.
Security Incidents are Inevitable
I wrapped up the conference listening to Matt Honeycutt talk about modern JavaScript techniques and how to deal with the fact that we are now living under the JavaScript regime.
Conferences are always a great way to meet other developers and learn about new technologies and ideas and while CodeStock is barely over I can’t wait for next year.