This year, Kansas City Developer Conference – KCDC – was held at the end of June, from the 26th to the 28th. I had a brilliant time there as one of the speakers; the event was beautifully organised and I sincerely hope to back again next year.

Hosted at the Kansas City Conference Center in the heart of Kansas City, this event is known for warm hospitality to everyone who attends. The atmosphere throughout the conference was so welcoming and cheerful, and it wasn’t just the organisers – I spoke to a lot of local attendees who were so excited to tell me how much they love KC and what it has to offer.

Wednesday was the pre-conference workshop day, and as I wasn’t attending any workshops I had the chance to explore the city a bit. In the evening we had the speakers’ dinner, which is an event for all the speakers, workshop runners, and organisers to get together and hang out. The food was really good, and the conversation was even better.

On Thursday the main event kicked off: the talk days of the conference.

Both of my talks were scheduled for this day, so I spent my time split between the stage and the speakers’ room where we could quietly hang out and do last-minute talk prep. My first talk was on asymmetric encryption and the maths behind it, which I studied at university – it’s really cool to be able to use my degree for something real! My second was on the past, present and future of physical data storage, and is a fun journey though weird historical facts and hardware trivia.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, I also recorded an episode of RunAsRadio with the incomparable Richard Campbell about the topics from my first talk, asymmetric cryptography and quantum computing. Richard has been running podcast since before they were called podcasts, and .NET Rocks! – his other famous one – is arguably the oldest still-running podcast in the world. My episode of RunAsRadio should air in August, and I’m really excited to listen back to it!

On the second day I actually got to see some talks; first up was Kevin Griffin talking about relational database mistakes. In a previous job, I worked as a data engineer so this was a delightful talk to attend. At conferences, it’s very easy to find speakers who will tell you all about their successes, but those who are willing to talk about failures are all the more interesting. Kevin finished the talk by inviting audience members to share stories of mistakes they’ve seen (or made!), so we could all commiserate together.

I also saw the excellent Arthur Doler talking about routines and rituals, which was a fascinating look into aspects of group psychology, and how we can harness seemingly meaningless behaviours to create group cohesion. One of the things I appreciate the most about conferences is that you will often find talks that challenge the way you think, and offer a completely new perspective on things to which you’ve never given much thought; this was one of these talks.

Friday evening brought PubConf, a travelling post-conference show where select speakers give 5-minute lightning talks oin a given topic and compete for the audience vote. It’s funny, it’s rowdy, I can’t say much more because what happens at PubConf stays at PubConf. If you’re ever attending a conference and PubConf is running afterwards, you should absolutely go. I can say that I was proud of my own performance as one of the speakers (slash victims), and had a truly excellent time.