Heartland Developer Conference 2006

Bud Wheeler just sent me this excellent overview of HDC 06. Bud is a seasoned developer with Visionpace doing custom software development in Kansas City, with a focus on Microsoft technologies and agile software processes. Thanks Bud!

I just returned from the Heartland Developer Conference (HDC06) held in Omaha Nebraska. If you aren’t aware of this conference I strongly suggest that you look into it next year. It has to be the best value of any conference I have ever attended. It was a well organized and top notch production.

As I understand it this is a roving conference and has been held in a different city every year. This year the conference was held at the Qwest Center which is a great facility that easily handled the needs of vendors and attendees. There were over 500 developers at this years sold out event. Look for information about HDC07 to be out in December or January.

The conference was split into three tracks labeled Think It, Server It and Store It. I found myself in the Serve It track for most of the conference. Of all the sessions I attended the things that really excited me were XAML and ATLAS/AJAX. These technologies look to be very cool and I am going to spend some time over the next couple months playing with them.

The great thing about a conference like this is that the excitement is contagious. The speakers are evangelists for the technologies they present and it is hard not to absorb some of that excitement. What a great way to recharge the ol’ batteries. We too often get caught up in the daily grind of development. It is essential to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. As developers it is our responsibility to not only provide solutions for our customers current business problems but also to look at the future business needs. Developer training is a big part of that and I encourage every developer to spend some time looking beyond their current tasks. For me the chance to talk to other developers is as interesting as the sessions. The opportunity to discuss how they are solving problems is a great way to pick up new ideas.

To paraphrase one of the speakers, software developers are the only professionals that are trying to solve constantly changing problems with a constantly changing set of tools. How are you going to keep up with that if you are not doing something to educate yourself?