Unfortunately, I wasn’t selected to give a talk this year but an opportunity arose allowing me to go as an attendee. To save money, I decided to drive up which gave me the opportunity to visit with my dad for a couple days before the conference. My dad lives in Toronto which is about five and a half hours from Montreal. That’s not bad considering I live in Moncton. A trip to see him from Moncton is usually between a 15 and 17-hour drive depending on traffic and if you stop for a break.
In the lead-up to the conference, I was digging into Slack so I decided to turn some of that information into a talk just in case another talk is needed. At the very least, I figured I could present it to a local developer user group.
The conference kicked off on Wednesday, February 25th and the number of attendees this year seemed higher. After Covid, people were a reluctant to start attending in-person conferences again so it’s nice to see ConFoo bouncing back.
This was my first time being at ConFoo as an attendee and that made it a bit different. I was still able to reconnect with some speakers that I hadn’t seen since last year but it was less stressful because I didn’t have my next talk in the back of my mind.
As it would turn out, word came on day 2 of the conference that one of the speakers couldn’t make it because he just became a dad. The organizer asked the speakers if someone would like to replace him so I spoke to the organizer to see if he’d want me to give the replacement talk and he gave me the ok.
I spent the evening rehearsing in my hotel room and then, on Friday, I gave my Slack talk. In return for giving the talk, I received one of this year’s fancy speaker badges as shown in the following image:
I’ve already started work on talk ideas for ConFoo 2027 which will be the 25th anniversary of the conference. If you have the opportunity to attend, I highly recommend it. Not just because of the high-quality talks but also because of the networking opportunities with attendees and speakers.