Why every developer should go to events

I had already been working as a Front-End Developer since 2009, but I didn’t know many people in the field. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t very engaged with my career.

My first event was Front in Sampa 2012. I remember some of the talks perfectly, like the one on Responsive Design by Sergio Lopes, the one on Accessibility by Horacio Soares and especially the controversial talk called Don’t do freelance work! presented by Zeno Rocha and Bernard de Luna.

By coincidence, a few days before the event I had built an Eric Cartman using CSS and this little experiment was shown in that talk. That made me extremely happy and gave me the drive to build new projects.

This photo is iconic. A few years later, many of these people became important developers in Brazil and around the world.

After that event, I went home with thousands of ideas. I started studying a lot and became more active in the community. Some time later I built a bunch of projects on Codepen, a Piano Keyboard using CSS and JavaScript, a Blog, CSS Components, the CSS Meetup, helped organize the first CSS Brasil Conference, and more recently the FrontEnd BR org on Github.

I seriously doubt all of these things would have been possible if I hadn’t gone to that event. I felt inspired to create new projects and also to help improve the Front-End community in Brazil.

Meetups and small events are amazing and offer a really interesting level of interaction and debate, but big events are total immersion and give you the chance to spend the whole day with lots of developers.

A few tips:

• Go solo and try to meet new people
• Don’t be intimidated
• Listen to people and their experiences, they’ll be useful to you
• Never eat lunch alone
• Even if you don’t drink, go to the happy hour after the event
• Network
• Get inspired

I took part in organizing the CSS Brasil Conference and realized how hard it is to organize events that size. It takes a lot of energy, money and time from many people, and trust me, it’s not easy at all.

So we need to thank and value organizers around the world, and the best way to do that is by going to events :)

So… you need to go to events!

You’ll learn a ton of new things, make new friends and get lots of ideas. Maybe this is the push your career needs so you can take new paths.

Let’s go ;)