A few weeks ago I attended Stir Trek at AMC Theatres in Columbus, Ohio for the first time. Stir Trek is a developer conference featuring 48 sessions that fill a day full of presentations covering a wide range of topics including AI, DevOps, Architecture, and a lot more. Stir Trek's unique offering is that at the end of the sessions, attendees can simmer on what they've learned over a blockbuster movie premiere. This year's movie was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3! Attendees also receive a fun swag box and can enter to win "something" by donating to the mega food drive. Since the event was only about 2 hours from where I live, I opted to drive to the event the morning of so I awoke nice and early that Friday morning with plenty of coffee to keep me going all day and headed out. Overall, my experience was really positive and I wanted to share some of the highlights of my first time attending.
Guardians of the Galaxy Themed Swag Box
Sessions I attended
I aimed to attend sessions covering a variety of topics that I was interested in and the speakers definitely delivered some amazing content over the course of the day.
To start the day I attended The Power of Storytelling: Human Stories in a Digital World_ by Bekah Hawrot Weigel as I've been looking for ways to improve the content of my technical writing and blogs. This talk absolutely exceeded my expectations and was easily my favorite of the day. Bekah presented some honest and personal stories of overcoming trauma that I was able to empathize and connect with from my own personal experiences over the past year. The content of this talk really hit home with how personal software development can be and how emotionally complex people are behind all of the code and software that we as developers write and interact with. Overall, this session set the bar high and jumpstarted my day!
Next, I attended Mark Noonan's talk called Maintaining Accessibility in Complicated Components which featured a well-thought-out demonstration of modern web techniques for improving accessibility of web applications. Two things really caught my attention during this talk with the examples being implemented in Vue AND vanilla HTML/CSS/JS as well as the focus on testability which I found very insightful for Vue components. I met Mark at CodeMash earlier this year and he immediately came off as a nice individual and very knowledgeable in this area. I enjoyed getting to discuss Vue and accessibility with him personally and will keep an eye out for his talks in the future.
Jonathan "J." Tower presented Migrate Your Legacy ASP.NET Projects to ASP.NET Core Incrementally with YARP which I had seen a previous iteration of at .NET Conf 2022 but was excited to see the talk updated for .NET 7 and hear about the improvements for YARP. I've been wanting to try the Strangler Fig pattern on a few projects I've worked on that need updated to the latest .NET versions but are too big or complex to migrate in a big bang approach. Jonathan is a Microsoft MVP so naturally, the content of this talk was well presented and carefully thought out in a way that was consumable in roughly an hour's worth of time.
After a quick lunch and another coffee, I was ready to catch Steve "Ardalis" Smith's talk on Improving Data Access with Abstractions. Steve is an experienced presenter and his talks always have awesome content filled with a few funny pictures and an insightful narrative. Although I had followed Steve's PluralSight courses, conference talks, and blog for much of my .NET career, it's been really rewarding to get to work with him at NimblePros and see how he applies patterns and concepts in real-world applications. With that being said, I was looking forward to this talk because it was a new topic that I hadn't seen him present on and knowing he publishes Ardalis.Specification as a library for abstracting data access I had a rough idea of where it might lead. It ended up being a nice journey through various data access techniques like low-level ADO.NET to one of my favorite frameworks, Entity Framework Core. I enjoyed the comparison of pros and cons between ORMs like Dapper and Entity Framework. TLDR, like all other decisions in software development there are tradeoffs, both good and bad. I thought the star-based review chart was a great way to guide the listener through the pros and cons of each approach. I definitely recommend this talk to developers looking to clean up their data access in .NET.
Burnout is something most if not all of us developers experience at some point or another and in different ways so I was very interested in seeing Samuel Shaw's talk Debugging Burnout. There were a lot of important takeaways about being proactive in identifying burnout and managing factors that can lead to feeling burnout long before reaching that stage. This talk was presented in a way I definitely could find myself watching it every so often and focusing on trying to make a habit of some of the techniques mentioned on addressing burnout.
To wrap up my day, the last session I attended was Not Your Mother's or Father's C# by Brendan Enrick. I had been introduced to Brendan through the NimblePros' ecosystem but haven't had the chance to see him speak before so this was an easy choice for me. The format of the talk leads the listener through a brief history of C#'s journey to where it is today. It highlighted a lot of the features from previous versions that make the syntactic sugar additions in recent versions possible. As someone who uses C# daily, it was refreshing to see different ways of writing code and opened my eyes to a few keywords and features I haven't been using. Brendan also has a great sense of humor and made this talk a fun way to end the day!
Other Highlights
Stir Trek was a lot of fun for many reasons but one thing that was really great about attending was getting to connect with a lot of folks from the Ohio developer community. The event was a chance for me to finally meet up with people I had met virtually through meetups like Hudson CodeCraft and Cleveland C# User Group in person. Another benefit of attending was getting the chance to see a few of my fellow NimblePros who I interact with quite often remotely through apps like Zoom, Slack, and Discord but don't get much in-person time with. One of the NimblePros, Sadukie, is also an organizer of the event (you might have barely caught sight of her zipping around like The Flash 🤣). I had heard about how much planning and preparation had been done so it was rewarding to go and support the organizer's efforts. I also got to catch up with some old coworkers and meet some new people as well. Events like Stir Trek are super valuable to me now as a way to socialize with peers in a way I didn't truly appreciate in a pre-Covid world or completely remote role.
NimblePros Steve "Ardalis" Smith, Jeremiah "Coop" Cooper, Kyle McMaster (me), and Sarah "Sadukie" Dutkiewicz 🎉
Recap
Stir Trek 2023 was absolutely awesome! The organizers and volunteers deserve a lot of credit for working hard and making the experience amazing for the attendees. I had no previous expectations and this year's conference blew me away. For being a single-day event and a little smaller than a lot of the bigger tech conferences, I left with some great memories and plenty of new ideas and concepts to reflect on. I definitely recommend attending next year if this event has been on your radar. See you there!