Code was lucky enough this year to host Develop Denver! Develop Denver (#DVLPDNVR) is a two day conference with talks on topics ranging from dev ops, frontend, backend, UX, strategy, and more. It brings together all types of tech professionals, which is what it's all about. The conference aims to bring the tech community together, and celebrate it.
The first day of Develop Denver started with a bang. Right at 9am, the earliest attendees could check-in, Code Talent was filled with over 70 developers, designers, strategists, and entrepreneurs. The building was buzzing with excitement about the event, speakers, and super cool badges (pictured below).
We also had a contest for the attendees to win an Amazon Echo. The competition was titled Pitch on a Postcard: The Amazon Echo Contest and asked participants to pitch a feature that can be implemented on the Amazon Echo leveraging the Alexa Skill Set. First place will receive an Amazon Echo, second place will receive a $20 Amazon gift card, and third place gets a Code Talent gift box.
After an hour of coffee and networking, the actual discussions began. Develop Denver had three venues in addition to Code Talent: Dateline, Enterprise, and Hinterland.
Dateline, just a couple steps down the road, is a contemporary art gallery. On day 1, Dateline hosted "Node.js for beginners - Why So Asynchronous???" "Speed up my API," and "You can make anything: why make anything at all?" among other talks. The speakers clearly knew what they were talking about as the gallery was consistently packed throughout the day:
Enterprise, another venue, is also just around the corner. Enterprise is a brand new co-working space in RiNo, they just opened June 20th! The new space is filled with bright furniture, fun artwork, and modern technology. Yesterday, Enterprise hosted the talk "Say Please," by Cody Moiseve, a Senior Interactive Designer from The1stMovement. Moiseve began discussing the way we talk to our devices, Siri and Alexa, vs. the way we talk to humans. He suggested that our daily interactions with these devices could actually be changing the way we interact with humans, and not for the better. Some of the other talks at Enterprise included "Ways to increase designer/developer collaboration," and "Kill it with fire: rewrite or refactor?"
Hinterland was the third venue, and the farthest away from the main hub here at Code Talent--just three blocks away in a building made of entirely of reclaimed and salvaged materials. Hinterland is an art studio and gallery, "explicitly featuring artists who work with extravagant and coherent visions." . Talks yesterday included "Socrates and Software; Using Classical Dialectic to Improve Software Development," "Performance Tools," and "They don't care about your code."
There was also a photo station, which, needless to say, the Code Talent team had lots of fun with:
See this Instagram photo by @codetechtalent * 26 likes