It’s all that
THAT Conference is not THOSE conferences. It’s about the developer as more than a single unit: this year, in multiple ways.
I talked about our team as a system — more than a system, a symmathesy. Cory House said that if you want to change your life, change your systems. As humans, our greatest power lies in changing ourselves by changing our environment. It’s more effective than willpower.
Many developers brought family with them; THAT conference includes sessions for kids and partners. It takes place in the Kalahari resort in Wisconsin Dells. My kids spent most of their time in the water parks. Socialization at this conference was different: even though fewer than half of attendees brought family with them, it changes the atmosphere. There’s a reminder that we are more than individuals, and the world will go on after we are gone.
Technical sessions broaden perspective. Joe Morgan put JavaScript coding styles in perspective: yes, they’re evolving and we have more options to craft readable code. But what is “readable” depends on the people and culture of your team. There are no absolutes, and it is not all about me.
Brandon Minnick told us the nitty-gritty of async/await in C#, and how to do things right. I learned that by default, all the code in an async function (except calls with await) runs on the same thread. This is not the case in Node, which messes with the thread-local variables we use for logging. But in C# it’s easy to lose exceptions entirely; the generated code swallows them. This makes me appreciate UnhandledPromiseException.
Ryan Niemeyer gave us 35 tips and tricks for VSCode. I love this IDE because it is useful right away, and sweetly customizable when you’re ready. Since this session, I’ve got FiraCode set up, added some custom snippets for common imports, enabled GitLens for subtle in-line attributions, and changed several lines in a file simultaneously using multicursor. And now I can “add suggested import” without clicking the little light bulb: it’s cmd-. to bring up the “code actions” menu for arrow keys. Configuring my IDE is a tiny example of setting up my system to direct me toward better work.
Then there was the part where my kids and I goaded each other into the scary water slides. They start vertical. They count down “3, 2, 1, Launch” the floor drops out from under you and you fall into the whooshy tube of water. I am proud to have lived through this.
From personalizing your IDE, to knowing your programming language, to agreeing with your team on a shared style, our environment has a big effect on us.
McLuhan’s Law says: We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. This is nowhere more effective than in programming, where are tools are programs and therefore malleable.
But our tools aren’t everything: we also shape our environment in whom we hang around, whom we listen to. Conferences are a great tool for broadening this. THAT Conference is an unusually wholesome general-programming conference, and I’m very happy to have spoken there. My daughters are also ready to go back (but not to do that scary water slide again).