Andconf is a small (under 100 people) conference that happened for the first time in Aug 2015. There are tentative plans to do it again in 2016. The vast majority of attendees were developers (early career, mid career, and mid+ career)

The first evening (we arrived friday evening) there were 90-second lightning talks- maybe about 20 of them. The second day also had several lightning talks.

On Saturday, we did pair programming TDD, six rounds of 45 min each (swap pairs for every round) on one problem (conway’s game of life- a little complicated but with easily describable rules), and you delete all code after each round. I did rounds in ruby, python, and javascript. One of the rounds, you were forbidden to talk out loud to your pair after the first minute. (Lessons learned: variable naming is super important, and ping pong programming is awesome.) One round, we were not supposed to use any if statements. Another round we did “evil pairing” where you’re supposed to implement the test in the least helpful way possible- this forces the test-writer to write better tests. This was great for getting more experience with pair programming in a low-stress and friendly environment.

The second day was an “unconference” - all participants, after arriving at the conference, suggest talks on notecards taped to a wall, vote for your favorites with dots, and organizers assign tracks and rooms to the most voted ones. We ended up with three tracks of nine talks each- half an hour or 45 min per talk (there were some longer slots), with fifteen minutes to chat and travel between talks.

Note: all unconference talks were group discussions, with a group-picked facillitator. This worked well, probably in large part because of the expectation-setting beforehand and instructions on how to run the discussion.

Unconference talks I attended:

  • A/B testing: how and why - everyone shared how their companies do it, pain points, implementation notes
  • Devops (intro to) - what is it, how is it practiced at different companies, how do you learn it (resources approaches)
  • Code in Space / Astrophysics / Orbital Timezones - one attendee worked on New Horizons, one does advanced math involving relativity, and several had other astronomy-related expertise. We discussed NASA code guidelines, deterministic languages, inturrupt-driven code, etc (I suggested this session)
  • How to deal with giant codebases - discussed how to break them apart, onboard onto a monolith, use tools to see where the complexity is, what “big” means, etc
  • functional programming (what is, why do) (I suggested this session)
  • XSS and other browser security concerns - this was the session that made me the most desirous of having the internet in order to look things up. No one knows much about security and sometimes it feels like the blind leading the blind.
  • What makes a good tech company culture? - vactaion policies (minimum, not unlimited), open source contribution policies, bro-offices, and how some people like the startup life but then later have families that they need to go home to (personal evolution, company evolution)
  • Test Driven Development (why and how) - I have a lot of opinions about TDD and it was pretty hard for me to shut up and let other people talk, but I think I did… not terrible
  • Sane CSS development - This was the most useful session to me because I learned a lot about what other companies are using around CSS tooling. I have not done much front-end stuff and this actually helped me understand the current ecosystem basics a lot better. It was my least favorite session from a facilitation point of view.

Misc. notes:

  • “common law bug” - a bug that the users have come to depend on, and which you now have to maintain
  • “smug report” - a bug report that starts with “So I think I know what causes this-“
  • “shrug report” - a bug report that just says “It is broken”
  • Pillar Technology - a company in Ohio that is apparently enjoyable to work for and has good code practices.
  • readvitality.com - webzine
  • One of the attendees was deeply unimpressed with the Coffeescript Chef cookbook.
  • There are three programming languages for describing knitting patters (as discussed in the We So Crafty public slack- one of them is recently written)
  • For A/B testing, Optimizely is ok but expensive, and when you get to working at scale it is not flexible enough and you will have to build your own.
  • Website: Ops School
  • Book: Web Operations
  • Ammado - a healthcare startup
  • Flamenco - a Ukranian math guy who has a paper explaining space-time theory in a geometric way (recommended) - email
  • frontend ops
  • Question to ask about vactaion during interviews, to a developer: “How much vacation does your manager take?” - to tell how “real” their vacation policies are
  • Listening to people and trying to understand what they mean is an important skill that I got a lot of practice at during this conference.
  • an “omega mess” is old gross code that does not actually need changing, so you can just ignore it instead of trying to fix it. ???
  • CSP headers disallow inline javascript or CSS
  • Google has an app called Fromage that is intentionally demonstrating ways for an app to be insecure.
  • Some parts of security are noobs teaching noobs :(
  • There is an app where you can oauth your social media accounts and it will make recommendations for what you should to in order to make your accounts more private.
  • “Material” design CSS framework
  • POSTCSS is terrifying because its like everyone writes their own compiler-to-css depending on what plugins they use? What?
  • uncss - a tool that tells you about the unused elements in your CSS files and helps to get rid of them.
  • Bower - client-side dependency management system. Elm also uses it
  • Tool “strange” for node
  • pesticide.io chrome plugin to show the outlines of elements in development (and animates transition)
  • Bourbon - CSS vendor prefixing (?)
  • Tea Leaf - online dev bootcamp
  • Sandy Metz
  • rake app:notes and rake app:stats - test to code ration, todos
  • Book - about python testing - Obey the Testing Goat
  • SMACSS - a system for organizing CSS that some of the attendees were very fond of
  • Sabio dev camp
  • Wegowise in Boston is apparently pleasant to work for and has good tech practies
  • OSbridge was a good conf (portland)
  • OSCON was meh - very Oreilly corporate
  • #genderUX and gender dropdown example
  • Infinite trad irish session by trained neural network

TODO for me:

  • set up jasmine to run js tests from the commandline from scratch. Apparently it is easy.
  • think about running a mini version of the coding day at Borderlands
  • email the humans whose business cards I took photos of (done)
  • email and request the space-time paper
  • email pycon blogpost to human X (done)
  • do Game of Life in a Lisp dialect
  • Hello world in Elm

90-second no-slides lightning talk ideas that I could totally do:

  • Payment processing basics
  • Restaurant point of sale
  • TDD how and why and when to not
  • What is nginx

Fun quotes:

  • “My evil pair won!” “How?” “With lots of if statements!”
  • “If anybody has a thumb drive, I have a test harness”
  • “They voted with their butts and their butts voted for you.”
  • “My code has never been to space!” “You should fix that.”
  • “Time does not always go forawrd!” (timezones, servers, relativity)
  • “We also have an outdated wiki!”

Other fun things:

  • NailsConf where people brought nail polish and painted nails (during the unconference day, at a little table near the main traffic flow.)
  • The wall of twitter handles (since there was no internet, we wrote them on notecards and photographed them for later compiling into a list) https://twitter.com/dddagradi/lists/andconf-2015
  • tshirt modification with the leftover too-large shirts from the sponsor swag piles
  • New Horizons pluto stickers!!

Logistics and Venue notes:

  • Upon arriving, the hike uphill from where the bus couldn’t go any farther up to where the camp actually was, was not well communicated and some people ended up having a hard time of it.
  • It was pretty warm and the camp did not have AC
  • A tiny bit of internet at one location, but mostly zero internet and zero cell reception.
  • The food (provided by the venue) was really good for conference food. People with special dietary needs were well taken care of.
  • St. Dorothy’s Rest was the venue, and it is very pretty
  • Redwood trees!
  • There were ripe blackberry bushes along the path from bus to venue, and several of us ate some. Delicious! No ill effects.
  • By Sunday, several people were going around shoeless.
  • The Sunday eve bus left exactly 15 min early (7:45pm), so anyone who was precisely on time would have been left behind. :( I am not a fan.

The Most Important Part:

  • It was an intrsectional feminism conference for developers! All badges had a section for you to put your pronouns on! (she/her, he/him, they, …) and it was great. Discussions were not dominated or argumentative. People were respectful. I was very happy about this. Being among civilized people!

People:

  • TWer Ashley! :)
  • twitter-quaintence precisememory!
  • cczona is always cool
  • yayyy organizers!
  • the lady who worked on New Horizons!
  • cool dude Damien who works at Ministry of – (sponsor)