XLR8 Conference 2016 Recap

The past Saturday, 14 May 2016, Infragistics held its first XLR8 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria and judging by its success there will be many more to follow. JavaScript, Angular and Mobile dev skills were all accelerated by the leading minds in the field and as a bonus we also had a separate track for accelerating developers’ soft skills and design knowledge as well.

The day started with a beautiful morning and attendees filling the space as the networking started to gain speed. Meanwhile our great photographer (besides also being one of our talented Infragistics designers) Svilen Dimchevski was warming up with some creative shots like this one:

To boost the mood and start a day of insights and discussions, our own VP of Product Management, Community, and Developer Evangelism Jason Beres gave a brilliant keynote on mobile & IoT opportunities, the importance of embracing a UX-centered work process and the mobile state of the art in the enterprise world today. His intriguing talk got everyone’s attention that could be felt throughout the hall and confirmed by the feedback gathered following the event. Jason’s presentation received the highest ratings for his keynote! Our Infragistics star Jason rocked the stage yet another time!

After such an inspiring beginning, the attendees then continued to the other talks eager to learn more. The developers’ track was like honey to the bees in the face of the dev minds in the audience.

Our own Infragistics leaders in the JS & Angular field started the track with the “Evolution of JS&Web – Past and Present Challenges” by Konstantin Dinev and “Angular 102” by Damyan Petev who also ran a live demo during his session.

Lunch time gave the attendees the opportunity to explore the car of the year and get massages in between expanding their networks of IT contacts.

The afternoon continued to keep the developers’ interest with “Integrated Web Stack with Angular 2” by Minko Gechev, book writer and specialist in Angular 2, “Building Product Hunt for iOS” by Radoslav Stankov & Vladimir Vladimirov and the other star of the day (as shown by our feedback form) Martin Chaov with his talk on “Multithreaded JS Applications in the browser”.

Parallel to all the code ingenuity happening next door, were the soft skills and design accelerator presentations. This track brought diversity and enrichment beyond the code for our attendees. The topics covered were “Programming yourself for success. Myth or reality?” by Magdalena Nikolova, an NLP specialist, followed by “Communications in Stressful Situations” by Simon Harris. The design tracks were in the hands of our Bulgarian Infragistics team of UXers, including myself. Spasimir Dinev enlightened the audience on how to optimize their mobile designs with his “Choose their destiny” talk. My turn came with “The WHYs and HOWs of including the users in the process” for which the little XLR8con birdy helped me to get people’s attention on key points by his little flute whistles:

I want to thank everyone who took part in organizing this first edition of what will be a conference with accelerating success from year to year. We also want to thank our numerous attendees and sponsors without whom this conference would not have been possible. On a final note, congratulations to the lucky attendee who left with a brand new BB-8 Droid as their new self-minded buddy to play with at home!

Hope to see you next year, when the XLR8 conference will be even more acceleratingly fun and insightful.