Being a pro developer for almost 8 years now, you know your peers and the experts around the field. So when deciding on a conference you check out the speakers list, the organizer and the venue, in that order. I went to Las Vegas in the Spring for the DevConnections, the speakers list and the venue was the main drivers. On the speakers list for DevConnections was Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. I had the pleasure of enjoying Hanselman at PDC 2008, and he is on top of my speakers list. He is an awesome speaker, with a great sense of humour.
Besides Hanselman, GOTO Århus also has Martin Fowler and Anders Hejlsberg on the schedule. I’ve read some articles and a book by Martin Fowler, and is looking forward hearing him talk on the NoSQL topic. Anders Hejlsberg got some secret project up his sleeve, that I’m looking forward hearing about. These three speakers are my main reasons for attending GOTO Århus this year. In my perspective these three speakers makes the GOTO Århus 2012 a special conference this year.
In second line of recommended spearkers is Linda Rising, Jesper Boeg, Hadi Hariri, Jez Humble, and Michael T. Nygard. This year is going to be be my second GOTO Århus conference. I had the pleasure last year as well. I know that I’ll attend sessions that I didn’t plan on hearing. Going to a Microsoft conference you know that the topics will all be about and around Microsoft products, at the GOTO conferences the subjects differ greatly. From strong technical sessions to process oriented sessions. All aspects of software development. It is therefore a good idea to attend the morning presentations of the different tracks of the day. This might convince you into attending a session that you didn’t plan to attend in the first place, or fill in the gaps of your schedule.
Another important aspect of attending the GOTO conferences is the networking aspect. As mentioned above, the GOTO conferences attracts a wide variety of different peers and experts of different areas of software development. This sets perfect conditions for networking at GOTO. To me it seems like the speakers and the attendees are closer to each other, the oppotunities to mingle is higher at GOTO than at any other conference I’ve attended.
Besides cool speakers and nursing my network, I’ll this attend a ReSharper workshop, with Technical Evangelist Hadi Hariri from JetBrains. ReSharper is at the top of my tools list, and I’d love to learn more about this great tool.
With high anticipations I’m looking forward for the GOTO Århus 2012. See you there..?