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Monday, 01 December 2025
Alex Jones
3 minute read
Sending everyone to conferences can get pricey quickly. Spending money on conference tickets, organising travel, and the cost of hotels all add to the pain. We wanted a way for more people to attend a conference with simpler logistics & less travel. As a company, we're scattered across different locations & it's worthwhile bringing the team together to collaborate in person, offering people the chance to work & interact with others they don't always work with.
Since high-quality recorded talks are everywhere now, we figured we could host our own day & add actual discussion afterwards to connect ideas back to what we're building. This first run would be an experiment, aiming to simulate the feel of a real conference, & trying to improve on the experience by including discussions after each talk. We already had a projector & a screen, so we felt well-equipped to give it a go. It gave us a chance to test the idea & eat heaps of pizza.
In our effort to simulate a conference, we adopted a structure that resembled a typical conference day.
When selecting the talks for the day, we aimed to strike a balance between topics that appealed to all levels of developers. As it's the hottest topic at the moment, we included two talks on AI.
A fast tour from 60s experiments to LLMs, plus small, beneficial AI features we can add right now & a hint of where UI might go next.
Pulling apart the tiniest C# app: From source code to IL to JIT to runtime & why that knowledge makes tough performance and debugging sessions easier.
AI tools can clean naming & structure in older code while humans still guard domain meaning & architectural choices.
Quick baseline checklist for .NET applications, including solution layout, validation, logging, security defaults & test shape. Pick a couple & start.
A year of odd production bugs. Learn from the embarrassing mistakes even popular apps couldn’t avoid—and take-home strategies to prevent them in your software
Everyone who took part in the day really enjoyed it. Engagement stayed strong until late afternoon (though the early start showed a bit for some). We found that watching talks together did create a "conference immersion" feeling, even with a bit of information overload by the end of the day. There was a lot to learn and consider, which was great, but we definitely needed more breaks.
Discussing each talk right after watching helped the ideas stick, and the lightning talk was effective in engaging everyone; people immediately jumped into mini-debates. There is a real benefit from listening to a talk and discussing how it applies to the work we do every day.
Next time, we should throw in some movement mid-afternoon. A short coding kata or fun AI 'vibe-coding' session would help reset brains.
There were definitely some aspects to improve upon and some extras we could add:
- Bigger venue with lunch options nearby so people can decompress properly.
- Open talk submissions to let people nominate recorded talks.
- Expand on our brownbag sessions by opening up a slot for in-person lightning talks.
- Break up the day with a collaborative coding challenge.
We really think the conference was successful. We're certainly not the first company to come up with the idea, but it's great to know that it works for us. The format gave us a conference-like experience with less hassle and cost, & brought the team together in person. We look forward to rerunning it next year, but bigger and better.
Last updated: Monday, 01 December 2025
Alex is Head of Application Development and a full-stack software developer at Rock Solid Knowledge. He works with Angular, SQLServer, and C# on a daily basis.
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