About once or twice a year, I go to some kind of software development related conference. Things move so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Attending a tech conference is a great way to keep up to date with what’s relevant and useful. By the end of each event I attend, my brain is full. I have all these ideas and can’t wait to put them into practice when I get back to work!
You go to a conference and see the world as new and shiny, where anything is possible. Then, you take off the rose colored glasses and the post-conference blues set in.
Are we really going to throw out our current stack and reimplement the whole thing in Groovy on Grails? Maybe you work for a larger company or government agency that has processes and procedures in place that makes introducing new technologies difficult or downright impossible.
Do not despair! There is hope. Using the following three strategies, you can handle the post-conference blues and perhaps even make things better where you work.
Schedule Time to Review
After spending all the time and money to attend the conference, you want to get value from it. It would be a shame to simply take all your notes and shove them in a drawer, never to see the light of day. Even if your employer was footing the bill, the whole point of going was to learn and grow as a developer. That’s not going to happen unless you put some of your new knowledge into practice.
Before you return from the conference, perhaps even prior to attending, schedule some time to go over your notes. Actually block out an hour or two on the calendar. Block out more if you can manage it.
During this time, go over your notes, perhaps review the slides, if you have them. Listen to the audio again if it’s available. What you want to do during this review is to summarize your learnings into three buckets:
- Able to apply immediately
- Interesting, but needs work to implement.
- Interesting, but not applicable at the moment
You’ll use this list in a moment, but the general idea is to start formulating a plan for how you will start applying what you learned at the conference.
Accept That Change Is Slow
At this point, you may be staring down at a list a mile long. There are all these things that would be great to pursue! You may wonder how on earth will you do it all?
Like the old joke about eating an elephant…one bite at a time.
In the book Great By Choice, Jim Collins talks about the 20 mile march. The idea is that if you make steady progress each day, you can cover great distances, whereas if you sprint out of the gate, you’ll quickly tire after a few days and gives up.
At some point you will have to make peace with the fact that change is slow and steady, not a rocket ship of advancement. It’s not hip, cool or sexy. It doesn’t make the news. Slow and steady really does win the race.
This can be hard to accept, especially in our culture of instant gratification. I have certainly struggled with this, and continue to do so. Each time I start a new job or come back from a conference, I see so many opportunities to improve the software. It can be frustrating to see all the work still yet to be done. But I remind myself that each step taken is one step closer than where we were before. The trick, is to keep taking steps.
So settle in and get ready to make incremental progress.
Pick One (or Two) Things
Once you’ve accepted that you’re not going to change everything all at once, pick one or two and figure out how you can make progress towards them.
Maybe it’s just a matter of using a new language feature you didn’t know about before. For example, if you just learned about Java 8 Streams and Lambdas, start using them in your day to day coding (assuming you’re targeting Java 8, of course).
If your work environment is more restrictive, Perhaps you can build a development tool or test framework using the new language or technology. Start using that TDD development process you learned about.
Other projects will likely need to be worked into the project planning process. Look for opportunities to apply a new technology in future projects or in a part of the product that needs to be reworked anyway. Start building the case for using the new technology or process. You don’t have to have the world “lead” in your title to be a leader in your group.
Pick that one thing and be laser focused on getting it into your habits, routines, processes or development stack. After it’s firmly entrenched in you or your organization, move on to the next and the next. Each time you successfully introduce something, you build credibility and the next idea becomes easier to push through.
Conclusion
Attending a conference can be a great way to expand your horizons and learn something new. When you get back to your day job, it doesn’t have to be gloom and doom, wondering if you’ll ever get to do something interesting. You can handle the post-conference blues. Review your notes, realize it’s going to take time to implement new ideas and pick your targets carefully for improvement. Make incremental progress each day, and you’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish.
Discussion Question: What strategies do you use to implement the things you learn at a conference?