WDCNZ happened on 23 July 2015 and I was luckily enough to get a ticket through Summer of Tech.
It was my first conference / event in the tech / developer world and I was quite excited after reading about all the speakers.
It was pretty amazing having so many international speakers with such varied topics. The ones that stood out for me were:
Push notifications for fun and profitby Monica Dinculescu. I liked the use of Chrome for generating notifications and see that Facebook have recently got this going with Chrome (unless it wasn’t so recently cos I don’t get onto things as quickly as others). The example site that Monica set up was this one – https://caturday-post.herokuapp.com/ – what is it with developers and cats?! I love cats and it has actually made me laugh lots when I had notifications on and was getting cute cats. 
Nothing better than a good old chuckle!
Is Your Code Too Solid? by Sarah Mei. Great speaker. She gave the talk in such a way that even a newbie like me was able to understand it. Great use of images and metaphors. I have already tried to use some of SOLID in the coding I have been doing at work.
Another one that I found really interested was HTML5 Web Forms by Estelle Weyl
I have wanted to get back and have a good look at this as there is a lot that I do not know about forms and how to get things down with HTML & CSS that I probably would have thought you had to use JavaScript for.
Other talks that I went to were:
Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm by Carina C. Zona, thought provoking.
Walking the fuzzy line between design and development by Amanda Dorrell, interesting.
Automating the real world: an evolution in web development by James Macfie, touches on my work.
Ones I wished I had got too and need to make the time to watch the videos:
Revenge of the ORMs – Why SQL skills matter in 2015 by Megan Bowra-Dean. Was able to see a version of this talk at a Wellrailed meet up!
React Tips and Tricks by Vimal Jobanputra
And Joyful Web with Ruby on Rails and Troubleshooting Node.js – What to do when things go wrong.
I think the next weekend when there is no surf, I’m too tired to go to karate and the weather is absolute shit and my wife is away I might have to have a WDCZN session!
Oh and thanks to Sam, Cara and others that kept me company during the day!
