On Tuesday, February 21st, I started my journey to Montreal to speak at the ConFoo developer conference (@confooca) for my third time.

Usually, when I travel to the big cities, I try to use public transportation to get to and from the airport. The city I live in isn't very big but I decided to give our transportation system a try anyway.

Unfortunately, for me to get to the airport using this approach, I needed to take two city buses and then a coach bus. It's doable but it takes time and the coach bus only goes to the airport twice a day so the timing didn't allow me to use this approach when I returned.

One highlight of my trip to the airport, however, was a pheasant that graced me with his presence.

The conference was held at the Hotel Bonaventure where we were greeted by over 700 attendees and over 150 sessions in 3 days! Being in Montreal, it was fitting that some of the sessions were also available in French.

The past two times that I spoke at this conference, I only spoke for one session each time. This year, I gave two presentations.

My first presentation was given on the second day of the conference. For this session, I talked about how we're using Docker at Dovico to prototype views, try out different UI frameworks, and help speed up the development of Timesheet.

(source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/confoo/52734935208 )

The second presentation that I gave was on the final day of the conference. This time, I walked the audience though creating a Slack bot from start to finish by building a simple hot desk booking system!

(source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/confoo/52733940852

My slides, notes, and links to the code from my talks can be found in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/cggallant/confoo-2023

As my new friend, Andres Pineda, so correctly articulated in one of his sessions, there's more to a developer conference than just taking in the talks. There's also a networking component to these conferences. When I saw him at the opening party for the speakers, I recognized him but couldn't figure out where from. Later I realized that I had seen him talk online as part of UnoConf and he's one of the contributors to the open-source Uno Platform. We have something in common because I've been privileged to work with Uno and write them several articles for their blog. We were able to connect during the conference.

Speaking of the Uno Platform, while I was in Montreal, I had the opportunity to meet Matthew Mattei in person for lunch. I work with him when writing articles for their blog. I wasn't expecting it but I do appreciate that the Uno Platform sent me home with some swag:

Over the course of the conference, I was fortunate to meet some great people and to take in a number of really good sessions. My only regret is not being able to take in all of the sessions because there are usually 8 other sessions happening at the same time as the session that you're in.

On Saturday, February 25th, I made the journey from the hotel back to the Montreal airport. I thought this was a neat idea as I was walking through the airport to my gate:

It was a great conference and I already miss it. I hope to be able to attend next year's conference and I recommend ConFoo to everyone.

A huge shout out to Yann Larrivée for putting on another amazing event!

As a side note, if you happen to be putting on a developer conference, or know of one that's looking for speakers, let me know because I'd like to speak more. I've started setting up a Sessionize profile but you can also reach me on Twitter or on LinkedIn.