I live in a city with a rich culture, history, and a thriving technology scene. But oddly enough, we don’t have many tech conferences or big events for start-ups, developers, or even just enthusiasts.

However, the amazing team at TechMids are changing that. They’re a lovely organisation helping to support a whole bunch of meetups, and they’re running conferences 😱 And they’re doing it brilliantly.

Conferences you say?

Yes, you read that correctly. They’ve recently wrapped up the third edition of a conference being run as the highlight event of Birmingham Tech Week. This meant a very full day of talks in the Birmingham International Conference Centre, with a huge number of attendees ranging from business people to developers, students, and boot campers.

And I was lucky to be in the thick of it representing Infobip and our awesome collection of tools and products to help organisations and applications communicate with users.

So, what happened at TechMids?

It was much like every other conference, an early start with coffee and conversations at the Infobip booth. Got to talk to people who worked in Croatia (which was awesome to find in Central England) since Infobip is one of Croatia’s largest technology companies, as well as people building for other technologies.

But then the real stars of the show were on. The speakers started and just didn’t stop giving informative (and sometimes funny) talks. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch all the speakers deliver talks as I was in conversations with people at our booth. But here is a highlight of a couple of talks I did see.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this subject, Steve McDougall gave a session on SDK development. Ironically, I do disagree with the limitations of a generator approach, but I can appreciate the arguments he gave towards carefully considered hand-crafted client-libraries.

Lorna Mitchell did an amazing talk on Docs-as-Code, something my colleagues and I care a great deal about. She covered all the docs-as-code approach making it easier to use existing developer toolchains and processes to produce documentation faster and more continuously.

What can you take away from this, dear reader? In my opinion, you should support and attend your local community conferences where possible. And you really should be a part of your developer communities, they’re a great resource for learning new technologies and getting out of the bubble of knowledge most of us live in.