Sometimes you can go home again.

I was a member of the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group (a.k.a. GANG) for years and spent some time on the board, including 2 years as President. But I've had much less interaction with them since joining Microsoft and moving to Chicago in 2014.

So, I was excited when my friend Ondrej called to tell me that GANG was hosting a conference and I could speak there if I wanted. I wanted to be a part of this event, so I made the trek from back to Detroit.

The event was held at the Microsoft offices in downtown Detroit. About 70 people came to hear a presentation on both technical topics and soft skills.

Cassandra Faris opened the conference telling people how they can manage and  promote your personal brand.

J Tower was next with a presentation on how to use .NET Standard to share code among different types of applications and platforms.

I wrote a presentation about Azure Functions and delivered for the first time at this event.

Kevin Davis's presentation titled "Living your Best (Developer) Life" talked about how to choose and manage your career.

Aydin Akcasu had the best demos of the day, showing Bluetooth devices integrating  with the Chrome web browser.

Finally, Daniel Davis described the benefits of clean code and how to achieve it.

The event reminded me of a similar Saturday event I hosted to celebrate GANG'S 10-year anniversary back in 2011. This is the second year in a row, GANG has held GANGConf and president Ryan Albertson promised to do it again next year.
I hope to be there again for it.