DevConnections 2017 San Francisco

This week concluded the annual IT/DevConnections conference in San Francisco, attended by more than 1,000 developers and IT professionals from all over the world (44 different countries).

Presentations

Chander Dhall, CEO of Cazton and the Dev Track Chair for the conference, gave his much-anticipated workshop on UI, API and Server Side: Beginner to Advanced in One Day as well as sessions on JavaScript, API, and Server Side - Know the Secrets of Success and Ask the Experts.

This was a mostly hands-on workshop that was the shortened version of a three-five day corporate training Chander delivers at major corporations world-wide. One of the best things about this workshop is that even though there is a set format to it, attendees love the flexibility Chander has to offer. He is more than happy to cover things that may not even be listed in the syllabus if that's what the attendees want. Attendees love to see the way he simplifies major concepts and shows them easy ways to code.

The best part of the workshop is that it’s 100% real world tested advice. Chander cautions the attendees against using popular and highly prevalent, but inadequate practices on the web that can later lead to bad consequences. Most of his experience comes from working at multiple clients and since our teams do a great job of sharing knowledge internally, we have a perspective that is not easy to find on tech blogs. Given our hands-on trainings in US, Canada, UK, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, India and many other countries, we have a great understanding of the issues developers face every day.

In Chander's one-hour state of the art session on JavaScript, API, and Server Side - Know the Secrets of Success, attendees enjoyed learning best practices on all three in just one hour. On the UI, he discussed critical rendering path, expensive layout operation, dropping of frames and other quintessential points for web performance by understanding better how browsers work. He elucidated concepts that lead to scalable Web APIs designed with best practices. After explaining the pipeline, he also demonstrated how to extend a typical Web API.

Chander also led the Ask the Experts panel, which included developers from the Netherlands, Israel, Belgium and the United States. The audience was given valuable advice from these tech experts. The video is available here

Alison Wadsworth, Vice President of Cazton, spoke for the first time at this conference. She spoke to a completely packed room on interview tips for developers in her session Interview Tips from a Tech Exec. Chander also made a surprise guest appearance to discuss important technical tips for interviewing. The attendees were so excited about the topic that the presentation went over the allotted time by 15 minutes and the conversations continued after.

Together, Chander and Alison, publicly shared their personal secrets of success in both the technical and legal industries in their joint session Success Tips from a Power Couple. They shared their personal stories and struggles all the way from law school and masters’ programs to starting a business and running the multimillion dollar company that it is today.

Networking

One of the best-known things about our team is that we when are at a conference, our consulting is free for new friends we meet at the conference. It was refreshing to hear that we helped solve actual work problems for many attendees.

We make sure we never eat alone at these events. Lunches as well as dinners/drinks with attendees is a high priority. Some of the attendees also accompanied us at the Alcatraz tour and some decided to join us for a late lunch after the tour.

During the Alcatraz tour, we got some personal and in-formal questions as to how to succeed not only in the tech field, but also in life. We talked a lot about self-improvement, shared what we do to make ourselves better as well as had a lot of fun!

Code Reviews

Many attendees were able to bring in their work computers and show the kind of problems they were having and the team loved solving their problems. Before one of the talks, Chander personally was working with an attendee from 5:30 am to 7:30 am. Since, he sleeps less than four hours a day, he felt great being productive during these early morning hours. This probably wouldn’t have happened if the conference was in Las Vegas since early mornings are not quite as popular there!

Client Meetings

Last, but not the least, the team spent time meeting their existing and prospective clients in the Valley. Clients were kind enough to give a tour of Carmel and the team enjoyed some drinks outside on the 18th hole at Pebble Beach. Not bad for a day’s work!

Be sure to check out upcoming events for more from the Cazton team.