Telerik ❤︎ Fluent Conf

This week several of us from Telerik are attending O'Reilly's FluentConf 2014 in sunny San Francisco, California. We also recently opened an office down in Palo Alto, so we're pretty much taking over California.  

This year's Fluent attracted over 1400 attendees per the last "unofficial" count that I heard.

Fluent is a conference all about the web platform. Being that the conference takes place in San Francisco, you might think that all of the attendees are all hipsters working at big technology companies. We are a stones throw from silicon valley after all. There are indeed folks from Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like here, but there are even more folks from all over the country working in all different industries. One of my favorite things about Fluent Conf has always been the diversity.

Ignite

Fluent kicks off with a full day of workshops, followed by an event called "Ignite". Ignite is a series of lightning talks that are 5 minutes each. Each presenter has a set of slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. Even better is that this year's Ignite was sponsored by Telerik!

Rey Bango kicked off the Ignite presentations with a fantastic 5 minutes about what it's like to try and keep with with all of the new frameworks, languages and patterns. According to this slide, he feels a bit like a hamster on a wheel.

Ignite presentations are some of my favorite since I get to hear from speakers who don't normally present. For many of them, it's their first time presenting and THAT is awesome.

Keynotes

Being a web platform conference, Fluent naturally has keynotes from folks that are quite influential in the front-end community. This year's keynotes included Brendan Eich, Paul Irish and Scott Hanselman.

Sessions

I think this tweet from Corey House speaks volumes...

Fluent Conf front end library session counts: AngularJS: 15 Ember: 4 Backbone: 2 Knockout: 0 For what it's worth.

— Cory House (@housecor) March 12, 2014

Yep. Angular is big. I actually did two interviews on Angular while here at the conference. One of them was with the Huffington Post! They have a new HuffPost Code site that has some great and interesting articles you may want to check out.

I reprised my "AngularJS And The Computer Science Of Javascript" talk on what it's like to build Angular directives for widgets. This was borne of my early involvement with the Angular Kendo UI project. You're using Angular Kendo UI right? Awesome!



You can find my slides online, and the video should be posted by O'Reilly shortly.  I additionally tried to make sure that my talk was well reviewed, but I got outsmarted by technology.



Brian Rinaldi also did an AMAZINg session on WebAudio and creating 8 bit music.  I love sessions like these because they are really fun and break up the monotony of really deep technical sessions if you have been to several in a row. 

Selfies

What conference wouldn't be complete without selfies. Both Rey and I captured as many as we could and posted them to twitter. Here are a few of my favorites...

With the twitter team at Fluent. pic.twitter.com/vR72f7f6WC

— Rey Bango (@reybango) March 13, 2014

.@cfjedimaster SELFIE! #fluentconf pic.twitter.com/qnLaitHBbR

— Burke H✪lland (@burkeholland) March 12, 2014

It's @jacobrossi from the @IE team with a @reybango photobomb #fluentconf pic.twitter.com/Zu7FNc7quG

— Burke H✪lland (@burkeholland) March 13, 2014