The Tech of Things

As being one of the summer Software Developer interns for Santander and in the process researching all kinds of technologies I had some questions. On this specific day I had one about NoSQL and what the upsides and downsides were for using in the enterprise. I then went to my handy colleague Ross and that started a talk that lasted about 20 minutes. While we were talking another colleague Ravi was like you should record it! We were a little rattled by his remark but I went ahead and recorded it. Then I thought "Why don't we do a conference?"

In their minds they were like "Look at this intern with these ideas" "He does not know how our company works." but I was determined to make it happen and Ravi, Ross, and I set out to plan this conference.

This then started the beginning of planning #SCUSAConf_2013

It takes a lot to plan for a conference especially when you have NO experience planning an event like this. First tip that I can give you is be organized and have a game plan for each step of the process. Try to break each step up as much as possible into smaller tasks. Also, if you are planning to do one give yourself a little more time for planning, we had about one week and a half and we had some late nights trying to finalize everything.

To our advantage we had Lisa Fidler, one of our Executive Assistants help us throughout the planning process which helped tremendously given her previous experience as a party planner.

We had some great results out of the conference and below you will find the talk titles and a couple of pictures.

Talks:

Happy Super Blitz Developer Skills Exercise Techniques! Execute! Rawr! by James Marsh

Unit Testing : The Chuck Norris Way by David Robertson

Talladega Nights : The Ballad of Concurrent Programming by Ross Jennings

New World Ninja : NoSQL and JS Powers Combined by Ross Jennings and James Marsh

Hackathon:

We also had a hack-a-thon which should really have more planning than ours had but it still turned out to be a good time, experimenting and implementing new technologies that we do not really get to use.

Overall, the turn out was awesome and management would like to see more of these in the future in response to the feedback we had from the developers. So to the organizers and speakers CONGRATS!