That Conference 2015 and My ASP.NET 5 Talk
This week, I had the privilege to attend That Conference as a speaker to give a talk on ASP.NET 5. Here is a quick blog post on my conference experience.
16 August 2015
4 minutes read
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This week, I had the privilege to attend That Conference as a speaker to give a talk on ASP.NET 5. The conference is all done and dusted now. Also, I am tired traveling between Turkey, US and UK :) Even if I now want to lie down lazily all day long and do nothing else, I still want to write about my conference experience.
The Conference
That Conference was a unique experience for me. It marked my first ever visit to US and I had a chance to visit two cities: Chicago and Wisconsin Dells. As for the conference, it is a well-organized family friendly conference. I can say that this might even be the best conference I have ever attended. I also had a chance to meet some great people like Steve Cleary, Ryan Niemeyer, Seth Juarez and many more that I already had known from the community. I also made some new friends like Anabella Watson and engaged in very interesting conversations with those. I will be definitely keeping in touch with them for sure!
It was a three days conference and in each day, there was a keynote held. The first day was very special but I missed it :s It was Uncle Bob giving the keynote that day. The second day was a bit different because the keynote speaker was an FBI agent (yes, #AchievementUnlocked!). Byron Franz talked about cyber threat during his keynote. The last day's keynote speaker was Max Lynch, the co-founder of Ionic. To be honest, I really liked the concept of having a keynote each day. It was really empowering to start each day with an inspiring session.
I really loved the concept of Open Spaces! You can just go and block an available time to hold a discussion on a topic and people who are interested in the topic will participate you for an hour to geek out on that topic. How amazing is that! You have 8 more choices if none of the sessions happening in a block is not interesting for you. The best part about the Open Spaces is that you engage in conversation with others and share experience. I had a chance to host one on DLM (Database Lifecycle Management) and it was really enjoyable:
I also loved having 30 minute breaks between each session. There were no rush to catch sessions, it allowed speaker to engage conversations right after the session ends. The another advantage of this was that everybody were able to meet and talk to each other during these break. I absolutely loved this concept!
One bad thing about the conference is that the talks were not recorded :s There are so many great sessions going on at the same time and it's hard to choose. As the talks are not recorded for you to watch later, making decision on sessions was a bit more difficult. I am sure I had to sacrifice some great sessions.
My Session on ASP.NET 5
I had a great time delivering my ASP.NET 5 talk. Even though it was the last session of the conference, there was a lot of interest in the topic. You can find the slides from my ASP.NET 5 talk under my Speakerdeck account and the project I have shown on GitHub. I also had bunch of interesting questions about ASP.NET 5, specifically how the the existing pieces fit into this new world. Some of those questions will make great blog posts here in my blog :) If you are specifically interested in the session topic, I gave the same talk at Progressive .NET Tutorials 2015 in London a month ago and it was recoded.
I also had a chance to join MS Dev Show podcast for a quick discussion on ASP.NET 5, which was really fun. You can check that out here.
It was fun to record a discussion on #aspnet5 for #msdevshow, it starts @ 1:22:28, check it out #ThatConference https://t.co/iWXAO5MewV
— Tugberk Ugurlu (@tourismgeek) August 16, 2015 Special Thanks
I would like to specifically thank Redgate for making it possible for me to attend the conference by covering and arranging all my travel. For the record, I am not exaggerating :) We have a Travel department at Redgate to basically handle everything about your trip. I also want to thank Chris Massey who runs the Conference Club at Redgate and helped me on getting better at presenting by giving his input on certain areas to improve. Finally, thanks That Conference people for inviting me to speak and organizing a very special conference!
Hey, I'm Tugberk 👋
Coder 👨🏻💻, Speaker 🗣, Author 📚, ex-Microsoft MVP 🕸, Blogger 💻
I live in London, UK 🏡
