A New Kind of Developer Conference
At one point or another, all of us change our approach to software development (and life in general). Change is one of the things that keeps the industry fresh and interesting.
I’ve come to realize that the important thing isn’t how you build software or how you live: it’s how open you are to change and how flexible you are when you *need to change*.
This is why our new developer conference is named Iterate. It accurately sums up what we as software developers do: change.
Iterate is a one day conference taking place in San Francisco at Bespoke in the Westfield Mall on Feb 27, 2018. Iterate contains two talk tracks consisting of four talks each, and one keynote.
The event’s theme is being the best developer you can be. This means iterating your approach over time: your approach to engineering and your approach to personal development.
Iterate is bringing together some of the best and brightest developers in the world to cover two topics across two tracks: Build and Evolve. In Build, we’ll explore the ever-changing field of technical best practices (backend, security, front-end, etc.) and in Evolve we’ll talk developer culture: how to automate and improve your tooling, improve your productivity, stay passionate, etc.
The inspiration behind Iterate is that we wanted to create a conference that covers all the things developers care about, both technology and personal development. Most developer conferences focus exclusively on technical education. While this is obviously important, we feel that technology is only one half of the equation. The other half is improving yourself, improving your team, and improving your mindset.
To make Iterate an authentic and genuinely useful developer conference, we’ve made a few key decisions I’d like to briefly discuss.
Iterate is not a vendor conference. There won’t be any vendor talks, and Iterate isn’t about promoting the work we’re doing at Okta. Iterate exists to bring developers together to improve themselves.
Iterate is a joint effort between Okta, Twilio, the JS Foundation, Atlassian, and Algolia. We’ve brought together some of the best developer organizations on the planet to host this event. All of us are working hard to make Iterate a truly developer-focused conference that will impress.
To make Iterate a fantastic experience, we’re borrowing ideas from all the best conferences we’ve been to: Heroku’s Waza, NewRelic’s FutureStack, Twilio’s Signal, Pycon, etc. and adding in some new ones of our own. We’re doing our absolute best to provide a top-notch experience for all attendees. One of the things I’m most excited about is that we’re starting late – 11:30 am to be precise. Who likes waking up early and rushing to an event? I know I don’t!
Finally, we’ve decided to make Iterate completely free. Regardless of whether you’re a hobby developer or a full-time enterprise staff engineer, we want you to have access to the best community and coolest ideas.
If you’re interested in improving yourself and excited about the future we’d love for you to be our guest at Iterate. Please register on our official conference website, share it with your friends, and get ready to have a great time in February.
Space is limited to 200 participants, so if you’d like to attend be sure to register ASAP, as seats are already filling quickly.
Much love,
-Randall