DevConf Live! A real win for lucky IITPSA members
This year’s DevConf conference for developers found itself having to rapidly move from an IRL event in Johannesburg and Cape Town, to a combined virtual event on 2 April due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an event partner, IITPSA had tickets to the event to give away to six lucky members. They report that going virtual did not harm the popular developers’ conference at all!
Here’s what some of our winners said:
Sascha Lenz: I had a fantastic time, with great talks. Overall, DevConf did a great job even with the circumstances and I definitely was able to take things out of it. If I can, I will try to attend next year again.
My highlights included Vanessa Raath’s helpful presentation on how to get a better profile online for future jobs and opportunities; Clifford de Wit’s great talk on building a smart home that really works (I definitely will try this out once we have our own house) and Jacques Blom’s talk TypeScript + GraphQL +
The keynote talk was also very helpful to reflect on how I use my energy and tips how to improve my work capacity.
Kinah Muzvidzwa: When you are a developer and used to doing almost the same things every day, DevConf was a breather and a light to help us do our work better, and not waste time on old habits. The CSS session by Justin helped a lot because most of our projects we used bootstrap and this was hard to customise with the new CSS you can do more and make your apps more customisable. There was a lot to take in, the different languages to be used to solve concurrent problems by Edmore also helped me as an eye opener. On AI projects, we were always focused on getting results but with the way Lizette showed us how overlooked AI results can be harmful, we need also to not only show results but be sensitive of the results we deliver.
As a Java spring developer, it is of paramount importance to me to have an application secure and protected from hacking. The session by Mark was an eye opener to make sure we have the right header settings in our applications when we start development and how to use third party logins in our applications and protect resource applications. The closing keynote by J.B on how we can improve our productivity performance, how to write the code, organise the work and navigate the people, helped in burnout issues that we normally experience by focusing on the end product.
DevConf was really helpful and I am very glad I was a part of it.
Constandious Takura Munakandafa: Most of the sessions were insightful and the knowledge received was invaluable. Many thanks to IITPSA once again for opening up this opportunity to their members to be able to attend the virtual conference. The development and software engineering field has become so broad and no one can have monopoly over all the knowledge. As Bhekani Khumalo put it in the liberal arts session, there is now an abundance of information on the internet that can be overwhelming and will need one to apply appropriate filters to select only data relevant to the area of interest or specialty.
Anjuan Simmons also shared tools that can manage stress in this space. The coronavirus pandemic as an example has caused so much digital disruption and transformation in the IT sector with pressures of working from home for those that never had the experience before and those in the Healthcare and ICT sectors becoming overwhelmed with the demands of sound IT systems that will enable essential operations to continue. I would write pages if I spoke about all the sessions, but what I have learned from most of the sessions is that the art of collaboration and sharing of ideas will continue to be the driving force behind innovation in the IT space that will solve today’s and tomorrow’s challenges as per the theme of the conference.
