Codefront.io retrospection

9th of May (traveling)

My journey started from Varna. The city where I am living at. I had two flights to Vienna and after almost three hours stay at Sofia Airport I finally arrived. Sebastian Gräßl was waiting for me and we got coffee with Andy Hume, Hollie Lubbock and Mehmet Duran. We waited a bit, and our friends from Turkey came. We were ready to go to Linz. The place of the conference. The plan was to take a bus but because of a highway accident we had to travel by train which, in fact, was much better. There were around two hours gap, so we went to a restaurant.

That is how the real Vienna schnitzel looks like.

And here we are. Hungry waiting for our beers.

We got our food and after short chat with Andy, Burak, Sebastian and Fatih we went to the train station. We missed the first train but got the next one. The trains in Austria are really nice. You get a free wi-fi and there is a bar to buy some drinks from.

The hotel in Linz was nice. We left our bags and went to a restaurant for the dinner. I was there with Uğur Özyılmazel and two guys that introduce me to Demoscener. I did not know that you can do so crazy things in only 4K.

10th of May (the conference's day)

I woke up very early in the morning, because I was nervous about my talk. I grab a short breakfast and with a couple of the other speakers went to the venue - Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. It was really nice place. There was lake in the middle, and it was more like a park rather than a university.

The bad thing in such conferences (with more than one track) is that you cannot see everything. All the talks were going to be interesting, and it was kinda difficult to pick one. The first talk which I visited was Architecting Resilient Front-ends by Andy. He goes through various techniques for building solid front-end apps. I had to go out like ten minutes earlier because my talk was in the next time slot in another room. It went pretty well to be honest. There were roughly 40 people visiting it which is good knowing the fact that at the same time Vitaly Friedman was talking about Responsive Web Design and Thomas Schranz was leading his talk How to build products people want.

When my talk ends the stress gone and I only had to enjoy the rest of the conference. My next stop was track one where Kevin Sawicki talked about the GitHub's Atom editor. I learned many things regarding the architecture of Atom. I am sure that I'll start using it when they release a version for Windows (yeah, I know ... sorry I am a Windows user). I even had a chance to grab few GitHub stickers in the end. Four of them, but later because people were coming to Kevin again and again asking if there is anything left I shared three and ended up with only one - the Heisencat:

I somehow missed the next time slot (at 12:00). I was at the registration place talking with Vitally, Keven and Marko Dugonjić. Marko revealed his designing process to me. It was like a one of those evrika moments. His job is really interesting, and I am very glad that he shares part of his experience with me.

After the lunch Hampton Catlin talked about Sass. Hampton is a nice speaker, and it was indeed entertaining talk. The next one was by Eric Schoffstall. He is only twenty years old but he wrote one of the most downloaded Node.js modules - Gulp. Now I know the differences between task runners and build systems.

I stayed at the same room listening Monica Dinculescu from Google. I did not believe that this was her first talk because it went really good. It was also interesting to see How Chrome keeps users happy.

My last choice was happening in track 3. Hollie Lubbock with talked called UI design for open data. It was awesome to see how she managed to present the data from several museums. We even had a chance to ask her several questions in the end.

The keynotes were very fun. Sebastian and Floor Drees gave us an interesting summary about the conference. In the end, we all took some applause from the attendees.

It was a long day. We got a dinner next to the university and came back to the others. I spend the rest of the evening ... well ... watching Eurovision (can you believe this). It was more like a comedy show and not a song contest. We laughed so much that I almost cried in the end. The conclusion was that we know not only about web technologies but the music too. We knew who will win before the end.

11th of May (traveling back)

After a delicious breakfast, we had to go with a bus to the airport in Vienna. I spent like a hour and so chating with Serdar Dogruyol and Ilter Cengiz. We even made a selfie together:

I again spend the rest of the day waiting for my flights.

Special thanks

I should thank to Uğur for organizing this amazing event and to Fatih for the invitation. All the speakers, organizers from Turkey and attendees were really friendly to me. I got only nice chats with everyone, and it was a pleasure speaking at this conference.

Looking forward to meeting you again guys. I hope to see you soon.