We recently attended Stir Trek 2025, and we wanted to share some of our adventures.
While I’ve already recapped the sessions I attended on my own blog, I wanted to share why I chose those sessions and other work-related adventures at Stir Trek!
Meeting the Team In-Person
We’re a fully-remote company, so we don’t get to see each other in-person often. I do see some of my local teammates often. However, there are some that I still haven’t met in-person. When I realized I had the opportunity to go to Stir Trek and some of my teammates that I hadn’t met were also going, I got more excited! Most of the team made it. Here we are:
From left to right: Kyle, Thomas, me, Coop, Jeff Z., Jeff V., and Scott
We were scattered throughout the event, catching sessions we wanted to. Hopefully, my teammates will share their experiences here!
Matching Sessions to Goals
When I looked at this year’s Stir Trek schedule, I found it hard to choose between sessions based on my initial thoughts. Then, I realized that some of the topics align with my goals for this period.
These are some of the goals I have:
- Learn more about HTMX.
- Get up to date on modern CSS techniques.
- Become more familiar with Signal R and Blazor.
So these are the sessions I caught related to those goals:
- Kathryn Grayson Nanz’s “I Didn’t Know that HTML/CSS could do THAT!”
- Jeff Fritz’s “Beyond the Basics - Building Reusable Code with Blazor”
- Alex Riviere’s “Hot New HTML”
- Eric Potter’s “HTMX: What’s the big deal with the little framework?”
I also caught sessions on topics I’ve wanted to explore of - including web components and .NET Aspire.
Key Takeaways
There were many things that I learned from these sessions. These are the key takeaways for me:
<summary>/<details>are newer tags! I use them in the eShopOnWeb FAQ, so I was excited to see them called out in these talks.- Since I haven’t had as much work on the front-end and get pulled for high-level concerns or back-end design, I’ve missed the fun of the front-end. I’m truly happy with front-end adventures. These sessions reminded me that I can still pick it up quickly and that HTML/CSS are still highly favored technologies.
:has(),:is(), and:where()will be game-changers for me in creating CSS rules. Kathryn gave more tips on working with those and how to use them instead of the dreaded!importantwhen playing the CSS specificity game.- Building reusable components in Blazor doesn’t have to be hard. Jeff Fritz did a great job of breaking it down step-by-step and showing us the “how”s and “why”s. I suspect I may put this to work in Blazor projects in the future.
- HTMX is good to know and have in my technology toolbelt. I’ve been hearing the buzz of HTMX, which is why it’s on my goals list. However, the more I see it, the more I need to play with it and understand its limits. It makes a bunch of front-end calls easier to read and provides good scaffolding. But I’m not completely sold on it… yet.
Conclusion
It was refreshing to go to a conference as an attendee. While I’m usually volunteering as an organizer or speaking at events, this time I finally caught a break. It was great to see friends and meet teammates. Stir Trek 2025 had such great content, presented by people who are passionate about these topics. So now… time to go play and see what all I can do with this new knowledge!