Last Saturday, I attended the Big Sky Dev Con (BSDC) in Bozeman, Montana. BSDC is put together by Montana Programmers, and is a wonderful place to meet others that are working in Montana in various companies. This was my second year attending and hopefully not my last. This post will be a quick overview of which sessions I attended and also my recommendation for others in Montana.

Sessions

BSDC is broken down into a keynote, two morning sessions and three afternoon sessions. After the keynote, all sessions have multiple options. The only sad part of this is that generally there are multiple great presentations at the same time, which means that no matter what you end up missing some great content.

The keynote this year was given by Mark Larimer and was a wonderful discussion on creating new companies in Montana. His perspective comes from his personal experience not only working in high tech in Montana, but also from co-creating Foundant. The first session after the keynote that I attended covered React Native. This was a wonderful introduction to how to create a cross-platform near native application using React. The second session I attended talked about how to create chat bots, and a handful of APIs that are currently available. This may also change how my current project is built.

The afternoon was also quite productive. The first session I attended was an overview of Deep Learning, with a specific focus on computer vision. The second session of the afternoon was focused on using JavaScript to create a spreadsheet engine that could calculate formulas. This required not only a topological sort to find dependencies, but also required tokenization and parsing the formula language.

The final presentation I attended covered some methods to crafting better code. Due to the wide topic area, much of this presentation was references to other reading material that could be used to further look into the topic. This also had a quick look into SOLID, code smells, refactoring, test driven development and more.

Recommendation

After going to two years worth of BSDC, I highly recommend others that have to opportunity to attend. For only $30-50 depending on timing, the conference is well worth it. Some of the conference content for previous years has been posted as videos on YouTube, which serves as a good introduction. Later in the year, most of the conference should be posted online as well. I would highly recommend checking these out, and I will definitely be checking on some of the sessions I missed. More information about the conference, its program, and dates as they are released can be found at: http://bigskydevcon.org/

Also, another suggestion is that getting out to meet others at conferences and other events is a wonderful way to learn more. Our workplaces, schools, and online communities can create a bubble around us. By talking with more people we at the very least can expand that bubble and learn more that we may never have seen otherwise.