Blog

As I write this, we are headed back to Sioux Falls from KC. What a great trip and great opportunity to sharpen the saw as we head into the fall. Summer at Omnitech gets pretty busy with new faces in the office, summer trips, and lots of collaboration. Time seems to move so fast during the summer season. I sometimes refer to the fall and winter as a "hibernation" season. The office is much quieter and it's a great time to do some deep individual learning.

Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC) is the perfect opportunity to make that transition from crazy non-stop summer action to a deeper more intentional fall and winter. In addition to the timing of the conference, the quality is stellar. Our team learned a lot over the last week and had a blast doing it. We're also coming away with loads of new ideas and technologies to research in more depth. We were able to attend workshops on Wednesday and the sessions on Thursday and Friday. There's way more than we can cover in a single blog post, so we'll each give you a small glimpse of our KCDC experience.

John

I'm a KCDC first-timer, but I don't think I'll be a KCDC last-timer. Almost every talk I attended gave me something to think about or a new tool in the tool belt. On Wednesday, I attended workshops on NextJS and Web Components. I learned a lot of valuable things about these web technologies and am excited to experiment with Lit and Storybook when we return to SF.

On Thursday, I attended 6 talks. Spanning from DevOps and the trajectory of the industry as it pertains to AI all the way to new ways of structuring your Front-End applications. I think my favorite session from Thursday was given by Bob Walker of Octopus Deploy. He outlined how his team transitioned to deploying with more frequency using trunk-based development and feature flags. He also touched on some of the drawbacks and best practices that he's found along the way that I'll definitely be incorporating in my strategies going forward.

On Friday, I attended 6 more talks! Again, a wide variety of topics were covered. DuckDB (an analytical data tool that's been gaining popularity), JS Signals, and new .NET Caching features just to name a few. I think my favorite talk of the day was from Rik Hepworth of Zure. He outlined his team's incident recovery scenario and how they sleuthed their way out of a major Azure outage.

All-in-all, KCDC was an incredible event! It was a breath of fresh air and I am feeling replenished and ready to dig into whatever comes next!

Dakota

Also a KCDC-first timer, I thoroughly loved all my time at the conference. The days were filled with engaging speakers, exciting technology, and delicious barbecue.

On Wednesday I attended a Next.js workshop that dove deep into real-world optimizations and usages of React server components. On Thursday I attended sessions ranging from DevOps reports to distributed systems architecture to web components. My highlight of the day was a talk on local-first web development. The speaker showcased some new technologies (dubbed “sync-engines”) that allow web-apps to program against a local database that automatically syncs with a hosted database behind the scenes. The result is an excellent user experience devoid of wait times.

On Friday I continued my sessions, attending talks on the ecosystem of AI agents, the struggles of managing architecture, JavaScript signals, advanced TypeScript usage, and the pros and cons of object-oriented programming. The highlight for me on this day was a story from a company that built a custom AI agent. The speaker presented the business requirements he was trying to solve and then dove into the technical details of how he integrated their application with Azure OpenAI and the hurdles they faced. With so much buzz in the world of AI, it was neat to see a real-world use case of someone utilizing this technology to bring value.

Brian

This is my 3^rd KCDC and I have come to realize that I need to clone myself to take in all of the sessions that I would like to attend.  Having a group of teammates there helps with the “divide and conquer” approach of solving this problem.

As with most things these days, many sessions focused on AI and how we as software developers can use it to enhance the solutions we are tasked with creating.  I attended a workshop on creating an MCP server and then later a session about securing MCP servers with OAuth.  I also learned about AI Agents and the current approaches for implementing them.

The variety of sessions continues to be what draws me to KCDC each year.  They have something for all levels of the stack.  I was in a local-first session, then a session on GitHub Actions and then another about keeping my Azure resources organized.

If you have the chance to go, I highly recommend this conference for its variety of content, speakers, and overall value.

Katelyn

I love cranes – did you know cranes can reach heights of 265 feet standing alone and greater heights of 1000 feet or more when anchored to buildings? As we learn new skills, technology, or experiences, we are building ourselves and reaching new heights.

I attended a wide range of sessions and learned about various topics such as user experience, accessibility, animation libraries, team building, historical UI failures, and some ways I could potentially utilize AI in my work. As you would think, there is a good variety of building blocks at a conference.

Not everything serves as an immediate foundation; however, the underlying influences and inspirations from these experiences are essential. Each experience shapes who I am, reassuring me that personal and professional growth is gradual. I draw inspiration from conferences and new trends, which enhance various aspects of my work and continually improve my skills and perspectives.

Knowing KCDC is a developer/engineer conference first, I wasn’t the only graphic/UX/UI designer attending. I definitely had to step outside of my comfort zone, but luckily, when attending these conferences, you meet new people, and of course, I was with a few of my incredible team members, who are so encouraging when you need it.

In today’s work environment, many organizations are focused on continuously improving the experience for employees across multiple locations, including remote workers. Traveling with coworkers offers benefits, such as building stronger relationships, improving communication, and encouraging collaboration. Getting to know my coworkers on a more personal level creates a sense of camaraderie and trust.