Music City Code in Nashville, TN was amazing.  This was its second year – it started as a one-day code camp and is now four (!) days – an agile conference, a day of workshops, and two days of regular sessions.  This was my first time there and I can’t tell you how awesome it was. I originally didn’t think that I would send in a talk, but decided to try on the very last day.  Lo and behold – two sessions and a workshop were selected!  And let me tell you, I’m glad I submitted.  Gaines and Mary Kergosien are incredibly gracious hosts who put on an amazing conference.  It’s clear that those two care deeply about the community.

My talks

First day was a day of workshops.  I gave my Angular 2, TypeScript and ASP.NET Core talk to the biggest group yet – just over 100 people.  The workshop was for the latest version of Angular 2 at the time (RC5) and everything went off (mostly) without a hitch.  Overall, the feedback for the workshop was great and I was very happy with it. The next day, I gave the firehose version of my Angular 2 workshop that introduces Angular 2 and TypeScript at a very high level.  Not much to say here other than it seemed well-received. My RESTful APIs talk had about 30 people in it which I was happy with since it was in the last session slot of the day on the last day of the conference.  This talk is always very popular and I was happy to close the day out with it because it’s by far my favorite talk to give.

Session Highlights

I went and saw Jay Harris’ talk on Designers for Non-Designers and it was awesome.  I learned a lot of stuff that I did not previously know about color and typeface.  (Also, his slides are amazing.)

The functional panel was really fun and informative.  On the panel was Bryan Hunter, a well-known functional programming expert.  He probably had the quote of the day.  (Fun fact – any time I tweet about F# or functional programming, it seems to get a lot of likes and retweets – this one was no different.)

Another talk I went to was Jeff Strauss’ excellent talk on modern development workflows backed by .NET, including using tools like NPM, Gulp, Kudu, WebStorm, and others.

The opening keynote by David Neal and Jeremy Clark was awesome and emphasized the importance of building relationships during conferences.  Jeremy gave a good piece of advice – Meet Someone New – which was kind of funny because Jeremy was the first person I met at Music City Code.

And of course:

I spent some time working and prepping for my talks, so I wasn’t able to make it to any other sessions.  Overall, it was a high-quality speaker roster and I know attendees got a lot of value out of the sessions.

Events

The speaker dinner was very nice – drinks, appetizers, and good conversation.  I got to meet several awesome new people and the venue was great.  The conference ended with a very nice attendee party.  The drinks were flowing and the food was great!  Not much else to say here except that it was awesome.

Some nice things

I can’t talk enough about how great Gaines and Mary are.  They really care about the community, but they take care of their speakers too.  Things such as:

Are all nice touches that make you feel appreciated.

Conclusion

Overall, I had an awesome time.  I consider it to be a must-see Midwest conference.  I got to meet a lot of great people and get to know some I’ve met throughout the year.  It’s truly been an amazing and humbling experience to get to go to so many of these conferences!  As always, thank you to my employer Ryvit for sponsoring me.

I'll just leave this here

Jeremy told me I should put this here. I guess I have quite an entourage.