Dear Startups–You’re Invited to PrDC in March!

Dear Startup,

Hi! You may have heard about Prairie Dev Con – or maybe not, so let me do a little intro. I’m D’Arcy Lussier and I’ve been putting on this technology conference since 2010. Since then its grown and we’ve seen fantastic speakers and sessions, and seen our technology community grow.

We haven’t seen you guys as much though. I know – startups are busy, startups don’t have tonnes of money, and startups need to focus on their product. But you need to get some technical feeding too; drink from the tech firehose, talk with others who have built or are building companies and products, and meet others in our tech community.

So I’ve done a few things to try and make Prairie Dev Con something that you, the startup, will find value in.

Startup Pricing
The biggest announcement is that we’re offering startups a special discount. Regular price of the conference (non-early bird) is $650.

Startups can send people for $275!

Why the discount? Because the startup community of today is the mid-to-large employers and businesses of tomorrow. Manitoba needs you, and we as a community want to support you as you grow.

We do need to put some parameters around what a “startup” is for this though, so here’s the criteria:

• Employ up to 10 software developers (Independent consultants are not considered startups)
• Have yearly revenues of less than $1 million
• Have been in business less than 2 years

Content Meaningful for Startups
We have a lot of awesome technical content for the conference, but we also have some folks who bring real world startup and entrepreneurial experience as well!

Derick Bailey, who operates the podcast hosting service SignalLeaf, will be talking about the “5 Stages of Entrepreneurial Grief”.

Leonard Cervantes, Product Manager for Mobile Apps and Emerging Platforms at CBC, will speak on getting the most from your team and how to manage a difficult stakeholder.

Eric Boisjoli from Manitoba tech company Bold Innovation Group will share about a scary lesson learned around scaling applications.

Mario Cardinal, co-founder of Slingboards Lab, will share his experiences developing a mobile application.

And there’s others as well!

So Consider Yourselves Invited
We’d love to have you come out and experience Prairie Dev Con! We’ve tried to remove as many barriers-to-entry as possible to have startups become part of our Prairie Dev Con family. You can get all the details about the conference, including information on registering, at our website:

www.prairiedevcon.com

Thanks, and I hope to see you out in March!

D’Arcy Lussier

Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg 2015–Speaker, Sessions, Registration Info Posted!

I’m always excited to do this blog post – the one where I announce that the list of speakers and sessions for Prairie Dev Con’s Winnipeg event March 2 – 3 2015 is now online!

Speakers

We have an incredible roster of 36 speakers coming out this year from all over North America, including…

• Leonard Cervantes - Product Manager for Mobile Apps and Emerging Platforms at the CBC
• Dave Haney - Part of Stack Overflow's core development team
• Wesley Reisz - Enterprise Systems Design Lead for HP Enterprise Systems
  

Sessions

There was such a strong response to sessions, and so many amazing talks, that for the first time ever in Prairie Dev Con history, we’ll be running six rooms to accommodate the over 60 sessions featured for our Winnipeg event!

Workshops

Dylan Smith will be putting on a full day “Introduction to the CQRS and Event Sourcing Patterns” workshop on Wednesday, March 4th!

Registration

Registration is now open, and Prairie Dev Con is still one of the most affordable professional development events in Canada!

Take advantage of our early bird pricing of $549.99 until the end of January, and groups of 3 or more still get a group discount of $50 off each registration!

Check out our Website!

Head on over to www.prairiedevcon.com to get all the information about our speakers, sessions, Dylan’s workshop, and how to register!

I look forward to seeing you out at Prairie Dev Con 2015 in Winnipeg!

D’Arcy

Refreshing the Conference Mission Statement

In only three months from now I’ll be putting on the 9^th Prairie Developer Conference. Ninth. In four and a half years. Wow!

The conference has come a long way since the initial event in June 2010. The initial conference was born out of what I saw as needs:

• A high quality software development conference for the Canadian prairies (MB/SK typically got overlooked by vendors and event organizers).
• A conference that would be accessible to people of the prairies – lower cost and regional, so organizations could send more people and get better ROI on training dollars compared to sending one person to a remote conference and spending on travel expenses.
• An incubator for new speakers to be developed in, and an opportunity for lesser known (but still highly competent) speakers to break out on a larger stage.

I feel that Prairie Dev Con has met those three things and continues to meet these three core needs. But I feel like Prairie Dev Con is ready to evolve – to take this thing that we’ve all built together and further impact our Canadian prairie communities.

I started thinking about what the mission statement is for the conference. I had never really thought of that before – what is it that Prairie Dev Con exists for? It can’t just be to “have a conference”. It can’t just be “offer learning”. There needs to be more behind Prairie Dev Con than just another technology event on the calendar.

After giving it some though, here’s what I want Prairie Dev Con to be known for:

Prairie Developer Conference is an event…

• for software developers to share, learn, and connect
• where all skill levels are welcome, from student to expert
• that’s inclusive of the tech community, regardless of tech stack or organization size
• that’s safe for all, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation
• that provides an opportunity for new community leaders and speakers to emerge
• that impacts Canadian prairie developer communities beyond the event itself
• that showcases the Canadian prairies to guest speakers and attendees

I want Prairie Dev Con to be more than just two days of sessions. I want it to be an experience where people connect, have those “a-ha!” moments, get excited about building something because of what they saw or heard or experienced, and that provides opportunities to continue those conversations and support Canadian prairie developer communities.

Now what does all that mean in real life? How does that look in practice? In the next day or so I’ll be making announcements around the March 2015 Prairie Dev Con that will speak to some of these, but otherwise – well the purpose of a mission statement isn’t to state what you’ve already done but rather where you’re going. It’s a statement you rally behind and move towards. It’s the values that you should be comparing every decision and action to.

I hope you’re just as excited as I am and share this vision about Prairie Dev Con, and I hope you come out to experience it this March in Winnipeg and this June in Regina.

D’Arcy

Winnipeg 2015 Call For Speakers – Update!

The call for speakers for our Winnipeg 2015 Prairie Dev Con event has been open for a little while, and I wanted to post some comments and updates for those considering to speak.

Call For Speakers Deadline Extended!

I received some feedback that a bit more time to get sessions in would be appreciated. So with that in mind, the new date to submit your talks by is November 14. 2014! Please submit your talks to our online form found here.

Topic Interest

I have a survey for perspective attendees to provide feedback on what topics they’d like. Although there’s still time for people to submit their feedback, here’s the top topic areas currently:

Must Have Topics	Really Want Topics	Have Interest In Topics
Mobile Development HTML5 Microsoft.NET	Dev Practices Dev Team Management Agile Angular	JavaScript NodeJS CSS MVC Azure

When submitting talks, please keep this in mind. Also, if you have a talk that doesn’t fall into this list I’d still encourage you to submit them. I look for diversity in the conference topics and would love to see talks around security, general cloud architecture (regardless of platform), and others.

I Forgot to Mention Speakers Must Be From North America

Did it again – failed to mention on the call for speakers page on the site that we can only accommodate North America speakers (its just too expensive for our regional conference to cover overseas travel expenses).

Apologies to those who have submitted from overseas.

Any questions on any of this please let me know!

Thanks,

D’Arcy 

Will There Be a PrDC Regina This Year?

You may have heard that the next Prairie Dev Con will be in Winnipeg March 2 – 3, 2015. But what about Regina?

I would love to do a Prairie Dev Con in Regina this June! For that to happen though I need at least 5 Gold-level sponsors to come on board before I book the venue and open the call for speakers.

There are many benefits to conference sponsorship in addition to the traditional name/logo recognition on marketing material, including…

• Complimentary Passes and Special Sponsor Pricing
• Booth Space
• Vendor Sessions
• Post Event Attendee Communications

Plus in addition to helping ensure the conference is a success, sponsorship enables us to provide access for high school and college computer science students to attend and plug into the local IT community.

If you’re interested in learning more about how your organization can help make Prairie Dev Con Regina a reality, visit the sponsorship page of our website: http://www.prairiedevcon.com/SponsorInfo

Thanks!

D’Arcy

Call for Speakers – Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg March 2-3 2015!

Some exciting news to share!

Save the Date – PrDC Winnipeg 2015 happening March 2 – 3!

The next Prairie Dev Con will be held in Winnipeg March 2 – 3 2015! We’ll be opening up early-bird registration in November.

Call for Speakers is Open!

We’re now accepting session submissions for our 2015 Winnipeg event!

The four themes for our Winnipeg event are: Expand Your Horizons, Dive Deep, Get Hands On, and Dev Stories:

• Introductory or informative sessions which help expand our attendees horizons.
• Focused sessions on one aspect of a technology or methodology that assume attendees have a basic understanding of the topic before diving deep.
• Interactive hands-on sessions where attendees experience and learn through doing.
• Real-world development stories that share wisdom, insights, and lessons learned from projects and experiences with technology.

For out of town speakers, the conference covers

• Airfare
• 2 Nights Hotel

We also do a speaker dinner on the Monday night.

For more information on speaking at Prairie Dev Con, including where to submit your session abstracts, visit our ‘Call for Speakers’ page here.

Thanks,

D’Arcy

Vision for Prairie Dev Con 2015

Planning for Prairie Dev Con 2015 events are in full swing! I’m talking with potential sponsors*, lining up venues, and next week the official call for speakers will go out. I wanted to share with you the vision for the 2015 shows and what you can expect content wise.

I love attending conferences and hearing about new technology, or about existing technology and a particular way to use it. But what I really love about conferences is hearing the real-world stories of software development. Learning how systems were architected, how problems were solved, how teams were structured and worked together. I feel strongly that while technical knowledge is important, the experience of software development is just as important to share and we can sometimes learn the most from the experiences of others.

So for 2015, in addition to the great technical sessions that focus on a technology or topic, we’ll be bringing sessions that tell developer stories – the how’s and why’s of system development and implementation, the roadblocks and solutions, and the reality of bringing technical solutions to various platforms. We’ll talk from different points of view – the enterprise, the startup, and everything in between.

As I look around the prairie communities I see a shift happening – communities want to do as much as they want to learn, to experience as much as study, and innovate as much (or more-so) as to maintain. Prairie Dev Con wants to be part of that shift. I hope you join us at our 2015 events and become part of it too.

D’Arcy

To join our mailing list to get updates on Prairie Dev Con, head over to our website www.prairiedevcon.com and fill out the newsletter form on the main page!

*Sponsorship is very important to the life-blood of a conference. If you’re interested in having your organization sponsor, get all the details here.