I’ve written about learning in the past, and how I’ve given up a bit on user group sessions. In my case, I learn more when I get behind my computer and write some code myself. But when Team4Talent offered me to attend Techorama, I didn’t turn it down.

I know people have opinions on some of the ‘celebrity’ developers in Belgium. But say what you want, organizing something like Techorama is a feat not everyone can pull off. So congrats to all the people that helped make it happen (and thanks for the vegetarian food!).

In the past, I attended TechDays every two years. The reason was that I found this more than enough. Most sessions were so-so and quite a lot felt like a Microsoft marketing announcement (with all due respect to the speakers).

This wasn’t the case with the Community Days, and neither was it the case with Techorama. One funny example of this was the fact that at TechDays, speakers used Internet Explorer. At Techorama, it was all Chrome and Firefox.

But the sessions were also more technical and independant. Of course, it was mostly about Microsoft technology. But I found the sessions I attended to be more satisfying for me as developer. At TechDays, sometimes you just got a brief introduction to something new, without digging in deeper.

Notable speakers for me were:

• Nik Molnar (Full Stack Web Performance and Guerilla Hacking an Extra Arm onto GitHub)
• Mark Seemann (Zone Out, Check In, Move On)
• Bart De Smet (Introduction to Roslyn)
• Mike Wood (Be a Better Dev)
• Grant Fritchey (Solving the Database Deployment Problem)
• Mark Rendle (The History of Programming)
  I will try to post some interesting slides and stuff I learnt. But for now, know that Techorama was worth attending. And apart from learning, it’s a great place to have fun and meet interesting people.

Update (5/06/2014): They just uploaded most of the slides to OneDrive.