I’m very excited by a new virtual event which is coming up, and at which I have been invited to speak. This is Day Camp 4 Developers, an event aimed at developers of all disciplines and focussing on the soft skills that sometimes we miss in our pursuit of technical excellence. I’ll be giving my talk “Open Source Your Career”, which looks at how being involved in open source outside of work can improve our professional development. The event is on November 6th, and you can buy tickets here.

There are a number of things that really appeal to me about this event:

• The virtual aspect and the crazy low ticket price ($35* – that’s a little over 20 quid to you and me – for a ticket. Personally I don’t know many people whose career isn’t worth 35 dollars) so anyone, anywhere, can be there. You can also watch the sessions back afterwards so even if you’re not available on the day, you can get this content on demand!
• This conference is the brain-child of Cal Evans and his wife Kathy (who genuinely is lovely and talented!). Cal is a good friend and mentor of mine who has been hugely influential in the way my soft skills have grown in the time that I’ve known him
• The lineup. When I got the initial contact for this event, it was just an email from Cal and I was like “cool, yeah”. It was only when things moved on a bit and I got another email with details and a CC list of the speakers that I emailed Cal to say “what is my name doing there …?”. As a result I’m looking forward to the other sessions too, which is absolutely the best kind of event to be involved in!
• The fact that someone, somewhere, has seen the importance of the social skills. I’m seeing some fantastic posts going out about the event and I think it’s really relevant.

So if you are free on November 6th (it’s 9:30am in UTC-6 so that’s 3:30pm onwards for me in the UK) then sign up and join in the fun. On twitter you can follow @daycamp4devs and the hashtag is #dc4d. The other day I saw someone describe this as a “finishing school” for developers and I think that’s a great way of telling it! Hope to see you (virtually) there :)

* unless you pay enough attention to get a discount code from me, watch this space!