Welcome to ffconf 2019

Plenty of development conferences happen every year, which can lead to analysis paralysis – which is the right conference for me? There are language-specific conferences for developers, who use Ruby, Python and Javascript, or platform-based conferences for WordPress or Drupal ambassadors. The list can go on…

As a junior developer, I want to continually increase my knowledge and engage more with the development community. But finding the ‘right’ conferences can be a little daunting. For the second year running, I plumped for ffconf, and had a brilliantly curated and deeply personal experience.

ffconf is a put together by Remy Sharp and the whole conference has a personal touch to it that makes you feel immediately at ease. Rather than focusing on one specific coding language of CMS, ffconf looks at the development industry, and seeks to instil best practice working principles across the community as a whole.

One talk that stood out for me this year was from Sharon Steed, who spoke about engaging empathy, something that translates into everyone’s daily lives and jobs. While it was not a coding-specific talk, it gave so much advice about how we, as developers,  can create better working teams. Sharon spoke about her personal experiences with work and the challenges around having a stutter – and how empathy in a collaborative environment has helped her achieve her goals, and help others around the world as a public speaker.

There were also talks from people about the fun that we can have with the web. Suz Hinton was particularly intriguing as she has taken the concept of the old Game Boy camera and thermal printer, and applied it to a web browser and a webcam. Take a look at progressive web-boy to try it out.

Videos for this year’s talks will be posted in the coming months, so keep an eye out on Remys’ twitter for links when posted. Well worth a watch.