DevSpace Technical Conference 2015

It’s been a long few days but I am back from Huntsville, Alabama after attending the inaugural two day event that is DevSpace Technical Conference.

For those of you that don’t know, DevSpace is north Alabama’s premier polyglot technology conference.

I was honored to be selected by the DevSpace team to be a presenter for their first year and give my talk “Passwords Don’t Work! Using Two Factor Authentication To Secure Users”.

It was my first time to Huntsville and Alabama so I was excited for the chance to get to add another pin to my map of places I have been to.

The conference was held at the Von Braun Center near the downtown of Huntsville. It’s a rather large complex of meeting rooms, conference halls and even a 10,000 seat arena.

I don’t remember what the exact count was but I do know it was just a little bit under 100. While that may seem small to some, that’s a pretty good number for a first year conference.

It was a two day event that was started off with a keynote presented by my friend Alan Stevens. There were 5 rooms that held one hour sessions plus another room for open spaces. Friday were 5 timeslots for sessions and saturday had timeslots for another 6. So all in total there were 55 sessions worth of top notch content.

I was slotted to present my talk on Saturday morning at 10:30am. Boy was I nervous about present as this was going to be my first conference presentation. To add onto the worry, I came down with a pretty nasty cold Wednesday and with travel Thursday, I actually was pretty wipped out Friday afternoon and evening. I was starting to worry that I would end up being unable to present my talk. thankfully, with a long nights rest I rallied and bounced back.

Things started off a little rough but I believe that the presentation went well. The attendees in my room seemed very interested in the topic and had a number of good questions to ask me at the end of the talk.

Finally, major kudos goes to Chris Gardner and the whole DevSpace team for putting together the conference. I know it was probably very stressful and time consuming and I really appreciate what they have done for the technology community, not just in Alabama but everywhere. Great job guys, I look forward to next year, hopefully being able to speak but even if not I will be there as an attendee!