Today marks the official start of Microsoft’s IT Pro and developer conference, TechEd Australia 2012. Right now thousands of industry professionals and enthusiasts alike are making the trek from all over the country to the sunny Gold Coast. So what’s in-store for them when they arrive?
This year’s main keynote is prefaced by two targeted keynotes one for IT Pros, and one for the developers. As a developer I’ll focus on that. Titled Dev Plenary, it’s theme this year is “Only write the code that only you can write”. That sounds fancy, but what does this cryptic message actually mean?
I spoke to Technical Evangelist Andrew Coates during the week to get the full explanation. The core idea here is that developers shouldn’t waste time writing code that has been written before. Developers should leverage existing technologies, platforms and tools wherever possible to reduce development time and increase efficiencies. If you are a developer writing unique and innovative code, then you should be focusing on that, not the fundamentals that are publicly available.
One example I can think of is social integration. Almost every consumer facing (and some business focused) apps today want to enable sharing to Twitter, Facebook etc. As a developer, we often all start with a black project and start coding. If the development work has been done to enable this functionality, it is simply a waste of your time and someone else’s money to re-write the same code.
This 1 hour pre-keynote is a great precursor of what’s to come in the 1hr, 15 mins main keynote called ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants”. This will feature Jason Silva, which if you’re not familiar with his work, I suggest checking out the video below from lalaninja.
Disclaimer: Jason is travelling and staying at TechEd as a guest of Microsoft Australia.