April 04, 2016
Devconf dawned bright and early in Johannesburg on the 8th of March 2016. The first one in South Africa, it had been eagerly anticipated by tech nerds, geeks and code cowboys across South Africa and the turn-out was spectacular.
The conference aims to provide developers with tools, practices and principles that will better arm them to tackle the current and future challenges of the South African development environment. It’s a day meant to inspire by showcasing practical advice and ideas that can assist a developer to grow and challenge him or herself to do the best possible work!
There were 5 streams of content being; crafting code, persistence and data, DevOps and automation, tools and frameworks and finally teams and people. A call for presenters had gone out months before and the team running DevConf had been hard pressed to choose the most relevant and useful topics to their broad audience.
Ultimately we had 3 of our incredible team present on the day. Peter Wiles (Chillisoft Technical Director) presented his talk on combining Neo4j and Elasticsearch (search and explore your data) in the persistence and data stream. Mark Whitfeld gave a great talk on Brownfield Test Driven Development, with practical advice on how to introduce Test Driven Development into existing (brownfields) or legacy projects. A terrifying thought we admit, but one that is absolutely possible with the right techniques. Our final presenter of the day from Chillisoft was Andrew Russell who spoke about unit testing your database with tSQLt.
As Bronze sponsors of the event, we also had a stand where visitors could pop in and view the fun and super cool hackable keyboard which went to a lucky winner later in the day. Chris Ainslie supported our team and held down the fort while the presenters were off drinking divine coffee and chatting. It’s a great event, a must attend in our opinion and we can’t wait to do it all again next year.
