Dart Developer Summit: Awesome two days spent with Dartisans

The first Dart Developer Summit took place in San Francisco's Google office at the end of April 2015 and it was two days full of Dart awesomeness! In this blog post   I summarize my feelings from the first Dart oriented summit.

Dart Code Lab

The evening before summit I led the 4 hour Dart Code Lab. Attendees had the opportunity to play with Dart through client-side and/or new server-side code lab, talk and get direct help from Dart engineers and see demos of some Dart projects.

I am really happy that I could spend nice evening with lots of Dartisans, talk with them and share my enthusiasm... about Dart :-D.

Photos by Faisal Abid

If you haven't seen the new server-side code lab yet, I definitely recommend to take a look! The code lab will help you to dive into Dart on server-side using the new RPC package really quickly.

Dart Developer Summit

Two days long summit with all about Dart full of talks, networking and more.

Dart cake!

The summit started with a Keynote: Dart Today and Tomorrow, where Dart co-founders Lars Bak and Kasper Lund highlighted motivation behind Dart, talked about topics such as Dart on Mobile and showed us the nearest Dart SDK roadmap.

Dart SDK roadmap

On what we can look forward to? Fletch, Dart Mobile Services, Dev Compiler, Dart SDK 2.0. Yep, and WebStorm becomes preferred IDE for Dart. Time to move out from the Dart editor.

And then the summit continued with talks from both Dart software engineers and other developers using Dart every day.

Observatory tool

We heard how to use Async in Dart (love async/await and definitely recommend using it, I wrote about it in my previous blog post), Observatory (I need to explore this powerful tool more deeply!), Reflection, Dart2js, external developers talking about switching to Dart and more.

Dart for the Web - SYODLAJS = Ship your own Dart Library as JavaScript

And the summit was not only about talks! It was also about networking and meeting other developers.

There were tons of Dart software engineers prepared to talk with you and help. Part of the schedule were also special breakouts sessions in which we were divided into smaller groups interested in some topic we proposed and voted for before (such as testing, Observatory, server-side,...) and then we discussed that particular topic.

The first day ended with lightning talks about not only Dart related topics (but the lightning talks are always fun).

Dart for Mobile

Next day we heard talks such as how the Google Ads team is using Dart (and makes their developers and users happy), moving from Node.js to Dart, and two Dart on Mobile talks: Dart for Mobile and Sky project. Pure awesomeness!

Sky experiment: No Java, just Dart...

And finally there was also a panel discussion as a part of a schedule. You asked questions, engineers answered. So interesting and fun!

Fun on panel discussion

You can find all the videos from talks at Dart summit online in this play list.

The Dart Developer Summit was really great event where you could learn a lot new about Dart, share same interests with developers from different parts of the world, meet Dart software engineers, talk with them and get help. I really hope that this event will also take place next year!