UpFront Conference 2019

Last week I attended UpFrontConf in Manchester and well, it was awesome.

I am lucky(!) enough to live far far away from Manchester these days, so had to travel up the day before. This meant I could attend the also awesome Before UpFront meetup event at LEAF, featuring the delightful Ashley Baxter who I saw speak at New Adventures back in Jan, and Elliot Jay Stocks, who I'd not heard of before but I'm glad I have now - if only for the introduction to the Korg Volca.

The conference itself was super, as always. I feel like a veteran now, having been for the last 3 years. My highlights this year were, in no particular order:

And then there was the small matter of the lightning talks. I was clearly full of pep and enthusiasm at the end of last year, because I applied to take part in the UpFront Speaker Bursary. The conference offers the opportunity to speak on a stage, with a mic and everything, to new speakers from under-represented groups, and this year I was lucky to make the cut! We got a full day of speaker training to prepare us, then a 5 min slot in front of a whole room of people to talk about whatever we wanted. My talk was on the agile concept of "The Prime Directive", I've done a super quick write up of it here somewhere...

I had a thoroughly excellent time, and met loads of awesome people both at the conference itself and at the after party. I enjoy going to conferences and meetups because it makes me feel part of something. Lincoln is a small place with not much techy culture happening (working on it...) so I often end up chatting to randoms on reddit and similar places, which is not always very good for me. I have talked and written before about Imposter Syndrome, something I think everyone experiences from time to time, and I've found connecting with real people who do what I do makes a huge difference. I may not be a real front-end developer, and I may not be as invested in some front-end things as others, but I can hold my own in most conversations about tech and can sometimes even add something interesting.

image