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Entelect's International DevDay

This year, due to social distancing requirements, we took our annual internal technology conference online! Every Entelect office across the globe joined in to have some fun while learning from their fellow peers.

This year, due to social distancing requirements, we took our annual internal technology conference online! Every Entelect office across the globe joined in to have some fun while learning from their fellow peers.

We kept the traditional elements alive by having a milkshake competition at intermission, our usual Twitter competitions ran throughout the day, and we held a ‘Suit Up’ challenge for the best dressed Entelectual on the day.

But the best surprise of all, which we had kept secret, was the announcement of our international guest speaker, Scott Hanselman. Scott needed no introduction for those in the world of tech.

Scott is a web developer who has been blogging for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has three podcasts, Hanselminutes for tech talk, The Developer’s Life for commentary on what developers love, and Ratchet and the Geek for pop culture and tech media.

Scott talked about “Using Windows to develop for Windows, Linux, or anything!” Not only was his talk extremely insightful, but also one of the most engaging virtual talks that we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. It was also a personal experience, as he brought us into his home, showed us around his cool setup and gave us a few tips of how we could set up our own WFH spaces.

Scott asked that we only sponsor a local community group that assist people to learn how to code in exchange for being our guest speaker on the day. We donated to GirlCode on his behalf, and will be assisting several girls in a boot camp this year to teach them how to code.

DevDay is an in-house technology conference organised, presented and attended by Entelect’s own people where the technologist, inventor, hobbyist, engineer, or artist in you can come to the fore. The event is part showcase, part science show, part geek club, part makers club; offering a range of lightning talks on cutting-edge technologies, as well as a variety of interactive exhibition stands where people can discover the latest creative innovations in technology. We want our people to become more® when working at Entelect through these events.

The first event took place 6 years ago, and as the company has continued to grow, so has our conference. DevDay is now hosted twice a year in both our Western Cape and Gauteng offices, with over 750 people in attendance. Our next steps would be to replicate this conference in our European and New Zealand offices once it is responsible to do so – and we hope to see this in play in 2021.

About Scott Hanselman
My name is Scott Hanselman. I am a programmer, teacher, and speaker. I work out of my home office in Portland, Oregon for the Web Platform Team at Microsoft, but this blog, its content and opinions are my own. I blog about technology, culture, gadgets, diversity, code, the web, where we are going and where we have been. I am excited about community, social equity, media, entrepreneurship and above all, the open web.

https://www.hanselman.com/