1 day conference – Danish - $50 - devdk.org

A year ago, three web developers from Odense thought that something was missing in their town. They thought that the city needed a conference focused on web development, why always go to Copenhagen or Aarhus, when Odense is in the middle of the country, and easy to access for all. They decided to start a conference, and Condevdk was born.

This first year was really about getting the conference going, and it seemed a smashing success. It was sold out months before, and even before all speakers was revealed.

From the looks of it, the conference wasn’t really a conference I would normally go to. It has much focus on front-end stuff, and not focused on .NET in any way. I decided to support the local conference, if not learning new stuff; you could always get a little networking and socializing done. I also love listening to anyone talking web development if they have just a little passion about the stuff they talk about.

Content

The talks wasn’t technical focused. It was mostly taking the eagle eyes view on a product or a case and telling about it. The speakers were all great presenters, some were on stage for the first time, but even these guys did a great job.

Two talks about startups:

Kasper Tidemann – Meemo - @KasperTidemann

Kasper talked about traveling from Denmark to the US, in order to get into making software. He had taken the trip from Denmark to New York, and thought he should make software straight away. He had an interesting story, which took him from Denmark, via New York and Chicago to San Francisco where he currently has a startup running. Kasper also talked a little about EmberJs, which he contributes to.

Martin LeBlanc and Nick Bruun - Iconfinder - @leblancstartup & @NickBruun

This talk was also on starting your own company; Martin created Iconfinder back in the days, as a tool for himself to find icons when he needed them. He talked about how their trip had been, going from basement programming to a company of five full time employees. Nick is the CTO, and he talked about how they managed their codebase, in order to handle an exponential amount of page requests. The catch line was one million users for three supporters. This had some good points on structuring your software, and setting rules for all developers to live by.

One about modern communication – Oxygen Software

Michael Pedersen - Oxygen Software - @OxygenSoftware

My colleague Michael Pedersen took the stage telling about modern communication. My company is much focused on intranets, and his speak was on what the customers expects and how we try to live up to that.

One about changing the world through software! – Greenpeace case study

Morten Skyt & Bjarne Christensen - Stupid Studio - @mortenskyt & @Arnii_dk

The guys from Stupid Studio told about one of their customer cases. A case with Greenpeace, about saving the fish in our seas! They told about the pressure they had had form their customer, the campaign had to be done in 30 days, because it had to be ready for a EU-voting which only took place every 10 years. Stupid studio is a creative studio, and didn’t have much focus on web before this case. The case was a mixture of offline commercials and online. They talked about how they used the web to gather signatures from around the world, and almost reaching their goal of 100.000 signatures. That way they were changing the world through software.

One about apps and security – Reenginering apps

Casper Storm & Peter Gammelgaard - Shape - - @CasperStorm & @PeterGam

The two developers from Shape took the stage and wanted to present security in apps. They are creating apps for their customers, and are regularly faced with demands of securing the apps. It could be stuff like protected content like videos and books, but also storing credentials properly in order to hackers not being able to get them. These guys did a live hack of an iOS app, a very nice way to show the data being sent between the phone and the server. They also show how easily it could be to do a man in the middle attach, where the spoofed a SSL certificate, showing the SSL might not always be the best way! Finally, they showed how to hack into an app, this was kind of cool, as they hacked “Flappy Birds”, making the game much easier to play, and changing textures in the game. Nice presentation :-)

One on the future of web the state of web standards

Kenneth Auchenberg - Citrix - @Auchenberg

Kenneth A from Citrix was one of the large names at the conference, he was cofounder of Podio, and is currently Product manager for the next “Go-to-meeting” at Citrix.

He had a lot of love to the web, and the web standards. He had a great presentation about how he saw the web today, and what he saw in the future. “The web is updating every 6th week”, a reference to Google Chrome and Firefox’ update pace.

This speak was very inspiring and Kenneth was one of the best presenters today, the topic and speak would have been great as a Keynote of the day.

One on Umbraco

Niels Hartvig - Umbraco - @umbraco

Finally, Niels Hartvig, creator of Umbraco, came and held a nice final talk. The talk was on Umbraco, and their history, how they are where they are today, and a little about how they see the future. Niels had a great talk with lots of humor, this was great timing, as it was late, and the first beers had already been opened.

Roundup on condevdk

This was an awesome first conference held by the three guys form Odense. The conference had nice content, and I liked that it wasn’t focused on any particular technology. Through the day, we heard about iOS, Assembler, Python, Ruby, Django, Bootstrap, Angular, and .NET. I didn’t get much out of the conference, technology wise, but the cases and stories told were all exiting stuff to hear.

For future condevdk, my wishing list would be more hardcore technology, like showing code on screen. I would really like that the conference keeps not being specific on any technology. Maybe two tracks, where one is for business and one is for technology.

I hope they can keep the high quality bar on presenters, I’m still very impressed that they got people like Kenneth and Niels in at this their first year. Keep up the good Work.