Blimey that was fun!

I am back from an extremely interesting weekend at Developer Developer Developer South West – a day long tech conference loosely based about .NET technologies.

Now as you may know, I’m a php developer – so what on earth was I doing there?

I’ve never been snobby about languages, they are means to an end – producing a product that does what it needs to do, and making the world a better place. How you get there isn’t really important to anyone other than the development team, so no, just because I haven’t touched .Net in years didn’t worry me, I was sure I would still get something out of the non-.net-specific sessions – and I did.

Another reason was to feed my secret geeky need to revel in the way different people approach things – why do people from one technology stack approach problems in a certain way? And what do they do that I and the world I live in don’t, and is it better? What Can I Pillage?

Also, I thought it would be fun – I ended up at the pre-drinks for DDD Reading a year or so ago and they seemed like a good crowd. The DDDSW people were charming, intelligent individuals happy to have their brains picked by anyone.

It was a remarkably valuable day. We are all working in the same industry, we all have the same goals – to produce solutions that are as good as we can possible make them within the constraints time, money and clients give us – and the knowledge and insights shared will stay with me for a while.

So, thoughts?

I’m about to open my code editor for the first time today – I’m not sure if I’m going to run screaming from the room crying “My eyes! My eyes!” when I see it, or roll around in my beloved php code like a dog in a muddle puddle happy to be home.

Will I be abandoning my first true love of PHP and embracing the .Net goodness? Not this week. But I have a project ‘radiator’ already doodled down and I’m eyeing up that blank wall behind me for potential kanban goodness. I’ve just been on a book buying rampage on O’Reilly and I’m pretty sure I’ll be using jQuery templates within the next few days.

Either way, I know I’ll never look at code in quite the same way again – I’m blaming the Test Driven Development session for that. Thinking about tests before you write the code and hence letting that guide your code design was the biggest Aha! moment of the day.

So I say this to you my friends, go forth and meet your fellow developers, no matter their platform, language or workflow – we need to share our ideas, our philosophies and our passion. And drink beer.