#DotYork

I love York. I love November. And I definitely love a good conference. But what do we all really love? Hashtags, obviously!

So here’s my breakdown of #DotYork.

He’s not wrong.

Taking place in the Central Methodist Church, the venue was an absolute beaut. And more than being stunning, it really brought the speakers into the range of the audience. This feeling of breaking down the ‘stage’ (speakers presenting from sofas on a level with the pews) made it feel more like you were being presented to by peers, which facilitated more lively Q&A sessions than I’ve seen at conferences recently.

And I mean, just look at this place.

Adam Warburton was also one of the conference speakers for DotYork, and gave a great talk on trying to figure out a user’s fundamental needs and responding to those, rather than listening to their wants.

The Head of Technology for Sky, an amazing speaker and an advocate for getting in smart people, and training them in-house.

Something I was vaguely aware of before this talk but hadn’t heard put into words before: There’s a large divide in the UK in regards to which web-development programming language is adopted. Python developers in the North, Ruby developers in the South. As a back-end web developer who moved from York, where I was working in Python & Django, to Guildford where I now work in Ruby on Rails, I can attest this certainly seemed the case for me.

As Sky was opening an office in Leeds that needed Ruby developers, this presented them with a problem. After hiring as many local developers or people willing to move as possible, they were still short. The answer to this was to set up a 2-month internal Ruby training course and to bring in smart people who were willing to learn. They also extended their reach by ensuring they were running extra events to give back to the tech community, including bootcamps, tech meetups at the office, and Sky’s Get Into Tech free coding course for women.

Jess White was another great speaker at DotYork, and gave an interesting talk about dashboards and why we should all be using them.

There’s so much raw data we have access to in our jobs, but what’s the point in collecting it if we don’t use it? As a developer personally working on a project that does a large amount of reporting on data and creating dashboards for the client, it got me thinking about why we don’t have more of this internally. Why don’t we currently have a single place where we can find out if any site that we run isn’t responding? This was definitely the talk that I’m personally taking the most away from.