I have had the great fortune to be selected to speak at St. Louis Days of .NET (now called DevUp) 4x in a row. I am always impressed by the organization of the event and the staff; plus who doesnt love getting a few days at a casino.

This year I gave one normal talk, my UI Testing with Xamarin talk and a new workshop which focused on Xamarin.Android. For the most part, the UI Testing talk went as expected. I feel like its beginning to lose its luster and I always feel like I come off as preachy during it; its hard not to when talking about testing. Nevertheless I do get positive comments and it does engage the audience, so thats good. However, I think this will be the last event I use it at, I am moving more towards development and DevOp centric topics, especially as my experience with Bitrise and HockeyApp grows.

As for the Xamarin.Android workshop, it was a classic case of being too greedy. I am very grateful the audience hung in there and a few even got it working. But, in the end, I was upset that I didnt take into account actually running the code on Windows as well as there being people who were unfamiliar with mobile programming in general. Overall, I made it work and it seemed well receive. Next time I give it, I will try for something smaller then a Spotify preview player.

As I prepare to head back to Chicago tomorrow, I reflect that it was one of my best conference experiences in some time and a great way to close out the year. I look forward to unveiling the updated version of my Xamarin.Forms Intro talk at Codemash in January.