Fullstack 2016, London : Day 2 (The fun continues)

We were already spell bound by the city of London, its culture, people and must mention the weather . Day 1 at Fullstack conf was like a dream. Awesome people, apt venue, lots of goodies , what not.

Filled with excitement we reached Code Node before time, just to attend Todd Motto’s keynote. About Todd Motto, if you are reading this blog and are active in JS community, then the man needs no introduction. But let me give you benefit of doubt, he is a well known contributor in Angular JS world, also Developer expert at google. He opened the day with his keynote on "Component architecture and Angular 2". With examples, he nicely explained the concept and learning curve of Angular 2. He also discussed various types of web components:- Stateless, Statefull and Routed. The session was jam packed and nobody wanted to miss a bit of it.

Keynote was followed by a small tea break, but our minds were not ready to stop. We used to hop on various stalls at the conf and talk to people from some renowned organizations who sponsored the event like Gum Tree, Sky, eSynergy Solutions and many more. Had a quick chat with Phil Nash from Twilio, a cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California which allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs. He explained to me the cool stuff they build at Twilio and about webRTC. It was indeed a fruitful conversation.

It was hard to decide which session to attend and which to leave. I went to attend "Becoming a polyglot" by Kirsten Hunter which turned out to be altogether more interesting than I thought it would be. She showed us how to write a piece of code in 5 different languages(perl, python, node, ruby and php) with same inherent logic and trust me it was not that tough. I was impressed.

Then there was this talk with a catchy title "AngularJs evolution - from heedless meddler to superheroic assistant" and it made me easy to decide my next session by Miloš Bošković. Starting from different stages of Angular JS, he showed how our coding style evolved in Angular. He mentioned an important thing that I would like to highlight here : “If you donot feel weird about your angular code your wrote 1 year back, then you havn’t learnt much and you still need to meet the pace with which its growing.”

We utilized lunch time as well to get to know people from different geography around the world. Clicking pics, tweeting, cracking nerd jokes. The best part about these tech conference is that its not just knowledge you take back with yourself, its the memories ,the great minds with whom you interacted.

Post lunch, I attended Claire Tran’s talk on "What Makes a Good Developer", guess every developer should attend this session atleast in the starting age of their career. Claire is a passionate individual who works at Gumtree and also support “Women Who Code” , a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers, which I found really interesting because women developers now a days are coming into the picture and its a great deal of pride for all women developers out there. If you are reading this “Hurray!!” to us 🙂

There was one more interesting lightening talk that I attended and I would like to specifically mention about it was "Dev interviews - You’re doing it wrong" by Guy Nesher. We here at TO THE NEW being part of technology vertical go through hiring process now and then. Its important for us to make a right decision while saying yes or even saying no to a candidate because either we can end up hiring a misfit or rejecting a great talent and we do not want to be ending up in either of the situations. Guy explained what is the apt way to judge the candidates,what skillset we should look for and some good advice.

No more theory, Time for some practical hands on. There were several workshops going on in parallel. We decided to attend "Espruino" though workshop on Tessel 2 and Interactive numeric computing were equally tempting. People made some cool stuff and won interesting prizes. IOT has always been a huge point of interest in JS community.

We din’t even realize how the time fled and we reached end of Day 2. We had some amazing discussions over drinks, comparing several frameworks and yeah pokemon Go ofcourse 😀