Branching out to Extend Your Technical Perspective

What's in your domain?

I appreciate how European developer conferences like DevTernity help me to gain a wider range of technical perspectives than I have available closer to home. (I live in Eastern Iowa, USA)

This conference had over 700 attendees from over 40 countries with my favorite speaker being J. B. Rainsberger with his "The Well-Balanced Programmer" presentation.

I was also glad I attended his "Surviving Legacy Code" workshop yesterday which he ended with an introduction to his "Universal Architecture" version of clean architecture and the value of having it.

This was my second European developer conference and I'm still impressed. The first was Domain-Driven Design Europe which was packed with people who take code quality seriously.

In case you're wondering, all the presentations at each of the conferences were done in English.

If you have a passion for software and the opportunity, I'd encourage you to try one of these. Getting outside your normal circle helps you to see other ways of addressing the challenges we all face in writing and maintaining software that can meet the needs of those who depend on us daily.

One of these is a great opportunity to combine it with a European vacation too. My wife sat this one out but we had a nice visit to Amsterdam together with an brief visit to London on our DDD EU trip.