Rock Solid Knowledge Developer Conference 2025

Motivation

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.

Conference day format

In our effort to simulate a conference, we adopted a structure that resembled a typical conference day.

• 08:30 - Arrival, coffee, pastries, and a chat.
• 09:00 - Intro: a quick thank you for attending & a summary of the day's intentions.
• Morning - Two talks followed by discussions on the ideas. What we found interesting and how it might apply to our work.
• Lunch - Papa John's pizza, a controversial choice for some.
• Afternoon - three talks - one of which was a series of lightning talks, with smaller discussions after each segment.  
• Wrap: Feedback for the day, discussing ideas for next time. 

Topics

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.

The past, present, & future of AI for application developers

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.

Unveiling .NET secrets with the world's smallest C# program

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-driven code refactoring: improving legacy codebases automatically

AI tools can clean naming & structure in older code while humans still guard domain meaning & architectural choices.

10 things I do on every .NET app

Quick baseline checklist for .NET applications, including solution layout, validation, logging, security defaults & test shape. Pick a couple & start.

82 bugs I collected in a year, you won’t believe made it to production

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

Takeaways

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.

Improvements for next time

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.

Closing

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.