Esri European DevSummit 2016

It’s only the second day of the 2016 Esri European Developer Summit, but so far it’s been a terrific week!

Living on the edge

I just so happened to get my passport the morning of my flight, so to say I was cutting it close is an understatement. The flight here was long, yes, but totally worth it.

Berlin is a beautiful city, and I imagine even more so with the Christmas season and lights on all the buildings. It’s also incredibly cold here, the other morning it was 26F and just what the hell! I have however discovered gluhwein and jagertee on every other corner to keep me warm.

The conference

First of all, this venue is insane!

Day 0, which was Monday, a gangster and I taught an all day training class on version 4 of the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. It was intense, it was mind-bending, and we covered some detailed material that will be released in the new 4.2 version of the API due out later this month. It was a lot of fun though and it was great to get to talk to devlopers eager to learn.

Day 1, was the plenary. I had the honor of being involved in the plenary earlier this year at Palm Springs and was more than happy to be involved for this event and talk about the JavaScript API. Plenary was great, and I even got to see some very cool stuff I don’t work with on a regular basis, like the ArcGIS Python API. The gentleman that presented on this, Rohit, showed some pretty pwerful capabilities to work with the API and services to run analysis on datasets. It was pretty damn cool.

Once plenary was done, I co-presented a session with Raul of Esri Spain on frameworks and the JSAPI. If you read much of my blog, you’ll know I have a soft spot for frameworks. Those feisty little fellas that are born everyday and can either fly or fly to close to the sun. This went over really well and we had a really good turn out.

I also had a chance to do a visualization talk with a Guenter of Esri UK and we were able to cover various considerations and capabilities for creating relevant and compelling visulizations. I’m really no expert here, but I can help to show you how the tools work. We were even able to talk about some of the new features coming out in 4.2 of the JSAPI.

The gangster and I presented on the awesome parts of the ArcGIS API 4 for JavaScript this monring to the same room that was packed for plenary and we filled about half of that size which is quite a few people. There is definitely a lot of interests on the topic. We discussed some of my personal favorites, like Accessor, Collections and much more. We even looked at some features that will be newly documented in 4.2 as well some updates to widget development coming to 4.2 that I’m pretty excited about.

Socializing

One of the highlights of the week has been able to talk one on one with some developers here in Europe. There has been some slight language barriers, but for the most part we can get by. I spoke with an italalian gentleman where some of my limited spanish helped the conversation along. I had a couple of interesting questions from users that I’ve taken note of that I’ll take back to the office with me.

It’s also been great to hang out with some of our international colleagues and the geodev team. It’s been a blast wandering around in the cold to find something warm to drink!

There is still a couple of more days of the DevSummit this week, but I’d be more than happy to return and do this again next year. If you’re in Europe and have been on the fence on attending, I would highly recommend it. It’s a little smaller, thus a bit more intimate, so you have easier access to the Esri developers and speakers as we wander around enjoying the fantastic food and lattes that are served here!