kod.io Linz
Last Saturday the very first developer conference of Linz was held at the Ars Electronica Center. A place I haven’t visited for 10 years. It was called kod.io and was the international spin-off of a Turkish event held last year.
What I really liked about kod.io was their aim to bring programmers from all the different niches together, bridging the gap between languages, much like we do with our Technologieplauscherl Meetup. And they succeeded. So we found ourselves in between the newest Front-End development extravaganza and command line tooling for databases, or were listening to deployment strategies for dev-ops. A really broad range of topics, but nicely tied together for a very open minded audience.
From all the talks given, I found the one by [Mike Adolphs] (http://twitter.com/fooforge) actually the most interesting. He told us how support was handled at Github, presented the golden rules of how to treat customers and coworkers alike, and showed how rewarding it can be to do support. It has a lot to do with company philosophy and having the right mindset.
This was also one of the talks which spawned a lot of interesting discussions. stahlstadt.js co-organizer Mike was talking about how support’s handled over at Runtastic, and my buddy Tom sharing his experience with support for his time tracking software. One thing that stuck with me was: Support has nothing to do with being the all-knowing human being who can fix anything, but with the motivation and urge to actually care.
Next to Mike, I really enjoyed Lea Verou’s CSS colour talk. She was amazing as usual and her presentation style is incomparably great.
Also Piotr’s command line talk was not only insanely funny (if you like the nerd-type of humour), but also very informative for one of the old bash users like me. alias computer,="sudo" already found its way into my .bash_profile.
There was also Pascal Precht, who showed some real life examples of AngularJS use cases. And I think now I get why people really enjoy this library. Still, it feels like hurting web standards on purpose and you reach the point where code gets really ugly very, very soon. I’m attending some Angular workshops next week, held by our friends from angularjs.de, and I’m curious if they can change my mind on that topic. In the meantime, please don’t redefine attributes which already have a function in HTML, Angular guys. Pretty please.
Other than that, kod.io proved again that Linz has one of the best developer communities ever. I had a lot of fun with my Technologieplauscherl buddies, and we already have great ideas for some upcoming event, so stay tuned!
One toast to my friend Gabor and his buddies of Prezi: It was so great to meet you again, and I’m so sure it was not the last time we met!
And to Floor and Ugur: You did amazingly well. Thanks for bringing kod.io to our beloved home town. And thanks for all the effort you put into. You can be really, really proud.