Max Katz

At the end of February IBM hosted its first open developer community conference called Index in San Francisco.  At the conference I was helping as a “room captain”. My duties included greeting the speaker, and ensuring the video/audio equipment was running smoothly as all the talks were recorded. Pretty simple 😉.

The conference had a number of very interesting sessions that I wanted to attend and most of them were in the same track – The Rise of the Human Side of Technology.  This worked very nice as I volunteered to be the room captain for sessions that I actually wanted to attend.

Below you will find the session I attended and links to videos. I highly recommend you watch the videos as all the talks were great.

Bear Douglas Lead Developer Advocate at Slack, in her talk Getting out of the bubble with global developer communities, covered strategies for planning and executing your first global developer tour – particularly in regions where you are less connected or unfamiliar with your developers. Watch the session video.

Alaina Kafkes Software Engineer at Medium, in her talk Tackling Technical Writing, covered empathetic, accessible, and thorough technical tutorials & blog posts break down tech’s barrier to entry and foster inclusion. Alaina shared actionable pointers to get people started with technical writing. Watch the session video.

Stephanie Morillo Content Manager at DigitalOcean, in her talk Creating a Sustainable Documentation Framework for Open Source Projects, discussed how content strategy inspired me to think beyond writing & editing Bundler’s docs, to thinking of docs as a product in itself. Watch the session video.

Sandra Person Global PM at Mozzila, in her talk Reflections on the Mozilla Developer Roadshow Journey talked about spending 10 months on the road collaborating with global partners and local meetups, influential speakers and freshly minted contributors, to bring over 57 Developer Roadshow programs all around the world. Watch the session video.

The following session is from Programming languages and platforms track.

Amahdy Abdelaziz, Developer Advocate at Vaadin, in his talk on Dismantling a Progressive Web App, demonstrated how you can actually build modern web applications that qualify as “Progressive Web Apps”. Watch the session video.

Of course there were many other great session and you can watch them all on the IBM Code YouTube channel.