Jazzcon.Tech: Down in New Orleans

In the South Land there's a city; way down on the river. Where the food is tasty, and all the coders deliver.

Down in New Orleans, between the Central Business District and the French Quarter, there's a little conference called Jazzcon.Tech that brings together the local flavor of the city and technical expertise of a talented group of speakers. There was even a live jazz band on hand during happy hour, following the first day of sessions.

For three days there were workshops, presentations, and conversations covering a variety of web technologies such as Angular, React, Vue, JavaScript, JS Frameworks, HTML5, CSS, and UI/UX design.

A couple of interesting tech sessions that I attended were Michael Hartingon's talk, "StencilJS and Universal Components," and Ray Gesualdo's talk on Gatsby. The idea of universal components was interesting. Imagine if you're a shop that has both React and Angular applications; you could build universal components that worked with both frameworks.

Ray's Gatsby talk showed the benefits of the React-based static site generator. An interesting feature that will require some more investigation on my part, is that Gatsby allows you to use GraphQL to grab blog posts from legacy sites. Another idea that may come in handy someday.

Smartsheet was represented by yours truly. I helped people better understand the relationship of the various pieces of an Angular application with my talk, "Connecting the Dots: How Angular Components Work Together." We discussed various terms such as component, module, service and route. And then, we went over how they worked together conceptual. And finally, looked at the code for those pieces and how they interact.

Each day of sessions ended with an inspiring keynote. The first night Jason Lengstorf talked about how cutting down the hours he worked actually helped him get more accomplished. And, David Neal brought tears to much of the audience with his talk, "Leadership for the Reluctant Leader."

Beyond the traditional presentations found at developer conferences, the Jazzcon organizers purposefully kept the allowable attendance low to encourage interaction between attendees and speakers. The evening excursions into the city for food and music provided ample opportunity for everyone to connect and interact. Plus, they were a ton of fun.

As the song goes, Hey partner, don't be shy. Come on down here and give Jazzcon a try. You wanna do some livin' before you die; Do it down in New Orleans.