Just a diary of the first half of my day here~
Cool name badge this year!
This year the tech fest was hosted at Reliant Center instead of UH, which I think is better, it gives me a more professional feel than the years before. (maybe it's the illusion I have since I graduated)
Reliant Center is not small, first I was having trouble finding an entrance to the Reliant park (it's a giant place) and most entrances were closed that day, so I circled around for a while before I find an entrance.
Once inside, I continue searching through the maze trying to figure out where is Reliant Center (at this point I have no idea where I was other then the fact that I'm inside Reliant), The lack 3G didn't help, nevertheless, after driving blindly I stumble upon my destination!
Once inside the center, I see signs about High School Arts showcase, which is the opposite of a tech fest. After walking around for a while, I realize I came through the wrong entrance, and the tech fest is on the other side of the building, and on 2nd floor.
I feel like a complete idiot at this point, not sure if any of the detail location information is on the website, but I swear didn't see it. I missed the opening but oh well... >_>
Got in line to pick up my badge and swag bag, pulled out my laptop and set up wifi, then went off to the sessions!
One of my reason on attending tech fest is to hang out, the industry is pretty small and I definitely run into many familiar faces, friends from school, former co-workers, current supervisors. It was nice catching up with everyone. =)
As a developer, I have to admit I've tried to (and did) join the bandwagon and write mobile apps, and plus, Microsoft/Nokia gave me a unlock phone earlier this year, but unfortunately I was too busy with graduation and life after graduation, I haven't have the time to sit down and write something, but I promise that side project shall begin soon. One of the talk I attended to was "Monetizing your mobile application". I went to that session to support on former TA, who was giving the talk, and also because I wanted to know more about the business side of mobile development. Paul made a really good point about developing under an LLC or the sort. I never thought much about the legal side of things, and with all the lawsuits going in the valley right now, developers should really protect themselves against the unseen.
Then I went to a talk about Minority Report. I don't want to say bad things about it, so to sum it up, last year's talk was better, and this year's talk was roughly the same as last year. But it's nice to know that the NUI technology is advancing other then just the gaming industry.
After a quick bite I went to attend Markus Egger's talk on "WinRT/Metro building a real application introduction". This session is full of information that I really should know but I don't because I never attended any Win8 talk/dev camp despite all the invitations I received (I blame work). XAML is changing a bit and looks like code reuse is out of the window.
Throughout the day between sessions, I went to collect stamps from sponsors in hope of winning the raffle (but I didn't), but I also get to have an actual conversation with some of them, most of them thought I'm still in school! Haha, at least I still look young! Collected a lot of business cards that day, but I'm not looking for a job right now since my job is already awesome~
I also attended a Kinect SDK session, there are some small updates on the new SDK, and I think I might need to buy the Kinect for Windows, I hope it comes with an SDK, I really don't want to shell out a lot of money for playing with Kinect as a hobby.
Lastly, went to a condensed Win8 Dev camp. Learned a lot about the style, standard, tips and tricks about developing Win8. And now I know who to bug if I need help submitting my app.=) I think Win8 has a lot of potential, I remember about a month ago I read about the Surface tab and I wanted one. If the hardware is good, the developers will definitely make more apps that are more sophisticated than a flashlight. There are only so much you can do to make your program run smooth with limited hardware resources. I always want to do more complicated calculations, in shorter time. We're greedy, what can I say~
Didn't stay till the closing since I have to leave for the UH game that evening, but I had a great time and thank you everyone who make this happen year after year!
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