Since December of 2019 I have acquired one of my most regular habits: that of attending every possible edition of The Developer's Conference (TDC), a big event in Brazil focused on the software development ecosystem. While I can't always manage to participate in the entire event, due to conflicting schedules and any other kind of randomness life throws my way, I always try to at least attend a couple of sessions. I find that getting updated on what is going on in the field and engaging with my fellow developers (in the broadest sense possible: programmers, Agile enthusiast, product people, etc.) reinvigorates my passion for this path in life.
The third edition of this year's TDC took place on September 18th to September 20th, in São Paulo. Thankfully, it was also in a hybrid format, so all sessions could be attended remotely. Although I was not able to participate in all of the three days of the event, as I am just starting at a new job and did not want to take any days off just yet, the last day of the event happened during a local holiday in my state, so I could participate remotely in the sessions of that day.
Topics of Interest
Normal editions of the event are always split up in tracks, each focused on a specific topic. I always take a quick look at what is planned in all tracks, but I usually gravitate towards a small set of them. Typically, I attend sessions about Software Engineering, Agile, Java, Cloud, Automated Tests and Artificial Intelligence.
Of course, in each edition I also lean towards a few other specific things that are relevant for my work at that particular moment. This time, I ended up gravitating a lot towards Developer Experience and Documentation topics, both of which are currently very dear to my onboarding-into-a-legacy-system heart.
Sessions
These were the talks I attended:
- DevEx: Transformando a Dinâmica dos Times de Desenvolvimento (DevEx: Transforming Development Teams' Dynamics), from the Tech Leadership track.
- Além Da Programação: Desbloqueando O Potencial Do GitHub Copilot Nas Squads Da EY (Beyond Programming: Unblocking GitHub Copilot's Potential In EY's Squads), from the Tech Leadership track.
- Lidando Com A Pressão Da Liderança Técnica Em Meio Ao Caos (Dealing With Tech Leadership Pressure Amidst Chaos), from the Tech Leadership track.
- Developer Experience No Mundo Front-End: Do Ruby Ao Next.js (Developer Experience In The Front-End World: From Ruby To Next.js), from the Web And Front-End track.
- Segredo Dos Times Escaláveis De Tecnologia: Criando Uma Cultura De Documentação (The Secret Of Scalable Technology Teams: Creating A Culture Of Documentation), from the Tech Leadership track.
Takeaways
While I could only attend a few sessions this time, it was once again a refreshing experience to engage with my community. Exchanging ideas and hearing real life stories of people struggling with the same issues and fighting for the improvement of our craft always gives a new surge of energy that we can then inject in our daily work.
A few concepts and ideas have stayed on top of my head in the days since the end of the event. Mainly:
- "Code UI". While I had always been conscious about making my code clean and readable, I had never formalized the concept that one can think of it from a user-interface perspective.
- "People scale knowledge". Another thing that I always knew instinctively, but I think I found in this expression a great way to sell the idea to other people when necessary.
- Tribuo (Java library). While I did not attend the talk about this library, I got intrigued to check it further. It seems like it does not provide the thing I would most want out of it (a way to run LLM inference natively in Java, without having to rely on consuming a server API), but it appears to allow direct interface with TensorFlow, which might be an interesting thing to experiment with.
Ultimately, I got the usual TDC experience: learned a lot, had loads of fun and reconnected with my peers. I am looking forward to the next editions, and especially to attending in person the final one here in Porto Alegre, this December.
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