AllThingsOpen 2019 Recap

If you haven’t heard, All Things Open is an annual conference on open source software (OSS) that happens in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s been going on for the last seven years and continues to grow each year. It offers a mix of keynote speakers along with smaller sessions and workshops on a variety of topics related to OSS.

One of the perks here at Echobind is being able to attend conferences. I chose All things Open due to the speaker lineup and my growing involvement with OSS.

Highlights

Overall, the conference was nothing but amazing in the quality of content and the opportunities to interact with other attendees.

The keynotes featured speakers including Ashley McNamara, Kent C. Dodds, Ben Ilegbodu, Chris Coyier, Tracy Lee, and Emma Wedekind.

Besides the keynotes, the smaller sessions and workshops were a great opportunity to learn from other speakers on various topics such as front-end engineering, back-end engineering and devops.

Learning about being a Developer Advocate at Facebook from Cami Wiliams

I really enjoyed the conversations I had with people over meals or in-between sessions. Raleigh has numerous appetizing restaurants so it was easy to find a place to share good food and conversation.

A delicious club sandwich and tater tots I had for lunch one day

Recommended Talks

Luckily, ATO recorded the keynotes and a select few of the smaller sessions. Of those, here are the ones I recommend watching:

You can find other recordings from ATO 2019 on their YouTube channel.

Not included: two talks I wish I could include here, but I couldn’t find the recordings for were “Does Tech Really Have a Pipeline Problem? Exploring Diversity & Inclusion” by Tracy Lee and “Building High Performance Teams Across Cultures” by Emma Wedekind.

That’s all! If you’re not convinced by now, all I can say is buy a ticket to All Things Open 2020. You will not regret it!