Stir Trek 2025

Stir Trek happened last week and is one of the best conferences in the MidWest so let's review the event

Considered as one of the best conferences in the MidWest, Stir Trek was on Friday, May 2^nd and gave the tech community an absolutely fantastic experience, as always!

What is Stir Trek?

Stir Trek is a one-day conference held at the AMC Dine-In Easton Town Center 30 in Columbus, Ohio every year at the beginning of May and focuses on multiple sessions during the day.

What makes this conference different from others? At the end of the day when sessions finish, attendees are treated to a blockbuster movie. This year...THUNDERBOLTS!

(Personal) Agenda

The conference started early and provided breakfast for all attendees ranging from donuts, fruit, and, of course, coffee.

After grabbing some breakfast and meeting some old (and new) friends, the sessions kicked off at 8:30a.

8:30a - Intro to OpenTelemetry for Developers

AL Rodriguez / @programmerAL / Slides / GitHub

One of the technologies I wanted to dig into further this year is OpenTelemetry (OTel) for integrating into Tuxboard for analytics. How convenient that it was the first session of the day.

OpenTelemetry is meant to gaze into a system's specific function and identify whether it's working as expected or not.

Mr. Rodriguez opened with what OpenTelemetry is, how observability plays into it, and how it's different from creating logs.

He proceeded to explain how Azure Application Insights SDK allows out-of-the-box OpenTelemetry like HTTP Requests and Requests Per Second (RPS) and all of the specifics of OpenTelemetry including the following:

• Tracing - Lifetime of requests throughout the system using Spans
• Metrics - Counters, CPU Usage/Memory, Requests per Second, etc.

Overall, I liked the presentation/code ratio. He presented fundamentals of OTel while showing code to demonstrate a working example. 

9:30a - Building Asynchronous UIs Without the Hassle

Dev Agrawal / @devagrawal09 / Website / Video (from Codemash 2025)

In case you missed Dev's presentation at Codemash, this was another chance to see it.

Dev's message was "asynchronous state is complex," but using Suspense with React made it easier to work with in the long run.

While I'm not a React developer, I was enticed by the JavaScript and UI aspect of the talk. Throughout the presentation, Dev gave demonstrations of an asynchronous application and user interface (UI) issues as a user.

Dev approaches his presentation by walking the audience through certain UI issues and applies code techniques to properly use asynchronous methods while providing loading messages for the user.

Dev presented a good understanding of how to resolve asynchronous issues by using Suspense with loading messages and how to avoid race conditions.

Again, even though I'm not a React developer, I found the talk very interesting with ways to provide user feedback using asynchronous UI methods and best practices.

10:30a - Asynchronous JavaScript: Livin' On A Prayer

Bob Fornal / @rfornal / Github / Website

Keeping with the JavaScript and asynchronous topic, I decided to attend Mr. Fornal's talk.

His talk was code-heavy and provided a number of examples and explained each one in detail so beginners and even seasoned developers could understand what was happening.

One topic I thought was interesting was how he explained how setTimeout was strictly synchronous. Again, he had examples to demonstrate it.

I'm hoping there is a video of his talk because there was a lot of helpful techniques and tips for JavaScript developers.

11:30a - Aspireify: Building and Deploying with .NET Aspire on Azure

Jeffrey T. Fritz / @csharpfritz / Video / Website

Mr. Fritz doesn't disappoint when presenting whether it's a presentation, coding on his Twitch channel, or on a podcast. His Blazor and Aspire content is spot on and I urge you to check it out.

For his presentation, he mentions his website called Aspireify.net. Not only was it created with .NET Aspire, it's considered a learning resource for how to build websites using Aspire.

The first part of his talk was explaining techniques he used to build Aspireify.net like using Redis cache, Azure blob storage, and Azure queues. The best part about Aspire is the amount of abstraction to quickly create websites.

Jeff gave some great tips and techniques for running Aspire websites.

• Use extension methods to provide a clean Program.cs
• Consider using const to avoid magic strings
• Schedule a time to clean up containers left over from building and testing

His tour of the site through code and the dashboard was a great introduction into how Aspire works. The Resources running is one of the best features of Aspire.

The second part of his talk was the deploying of code to Azure using the following commands:

• azd init
• azd pipeline config
• azd up

Even though these are simple commands, there's some additional configuration required to make certain assumptions when it comes to builds and using containers.

The session was well-balanced between code and presentation. Great presentation, Jeff.

12:15p - Lunch

The amount of "bento boxes" for everyone was astounding: Turkey, Ham, or Roast Beef sandwiches with chips and a cookie.

If you were looking for a drink, there were large coolers containing cans of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and bottles of water available at any time.

With everyone in line and grabbing their favorite sandwich, everyone had a duration of 30-45min to eat and move on to their next session.

1:00p - The Immutable Laws of Software and Life: Code Accordingly

Cory House / @housecor / Slides

I initially saw Cory House speak at Codemash and have enjoyed his presentations ever since.

His talk mentions (almost) all of the technology laws learned over the years. Some of these laws include:

• Shipley's Six Dimensions; can also be boiled down to the Iron Triangle (Good, Fast, Cheap)
  • Brevity of code
  • Featurefulness
  • Speed of execution
  • Time spent coding
  • Robustness
  • Flexibility
• Conway's Law - Organizations are constrained to produce designs which copies the communication structures of the organizations; Emphasizes the need to break down silos
• Hick's Law - The more stimuli (or choices) users face, the longer it will take them to make a decision
• The Fairbairn Threshold - The point at which the effort of looking up or keeping track of the definition is outweighed by the effort of rederiving it or inlining it

Of course, there were more laws during the session.

One of Cory's strengths in presenting is his ability to relax and interact with the audience.

THIS is what makes his talks interesting and entertaining.

2:00p - Everything You Wanted to Know About Containers But Were Afraid To Ask

Daniel Mikusa / @dmikusa / Website / Github / Slides

Dan's session gave everyone a glimpse into what containers are, what they can do, and how to use them effectively.

As mentioned in his talk, containers are everywhere and used for development (and deployment) purposes. However, there are pros and cons to using containers.

Pros

• Cheap/Fast
• Easy way to package code
• Ubiquitous and battle-tested
• Strong tooling and Libraries
• Standardized
• Efficient distribution protocol

Cons

• Weaker isolation
• Container Security Config
• CPU shares are challenging
• Noisy Neighbors

He explained how containers use layers, image hashes, volume mounts, and configuration files.

I liked his approach to discussing the technology and terminology and then showing configurations/setup for the containers.

Daniel's presentation was solid and gave everyone a better understanding of containers.

3:00p - Hot New HTML Features

Alex Riviere / Website / Slides / Github

HTML has been forging ahead with a number of features and I'm guessing there are a lot of web developers who haven't seen (or used) all 103 features.

In Alex's session, he covers seven of the most important enhancements to the HTML language over the past 10 years. The list includes:

• <detail>/<summary> Elements
• <dialog> Element
• The inert attribute (which I'm still wondering what the point is of this) :-)
• Popover API
• Attributes and attr()
• Declarative Shadowdom
• Updates to <select> elements

While he could've talk about all 103 HTML features, this "magnificent seven" was probably the most important features to showcase.

Of the seven mentioned, I didn't know about the inert attribute or the updates to the <select> tag (which I'm happy about).

Alex's enthusiasm and entertaining personality made this talk worth attending.

4:00p - HTMX: What's the big deal with the little framework?

Eric Potter / @pottereric / Website / Github

Ever since the first of the year, I've been hearing of a small JavaScript library called HTMX and wanted to understand a bit more of what it was.

Since I've been building out my open-source project called Tuxboard, I've been making various calls to the server to retrieve "Islands of HTML" using an Islands Architecture for the widgets.

After seeing what Eric presented during his session, HTMX seems like a likely candidate to encapsulate these types of calls and removing unnecessary JavaScript code. The declarative and unobtrusive approach to HTMX is very enticing and aligns with my "declarative-first" approach with Tuxboard as well.

The approach may be something to consider for a future Tuxboard post, but as an alternative, I would also like to try Damian Edwards' Razor Slices.

Eric's session gave a great introduction into what HTMX was and how to use it with plenty of code samples.

Great session!

5:00p - Movie Trailers / Feature Movie (THUNDERBOLTS!)

After all of the sessions, AMC had tables of popcorn all set for everyone to watch the Thunderbolts!

LOVED the movie and stayed until the ending credits which set up another Summer blockbuster.

Conclusion

I feel Stir Trek was another big success this year! I saw a lot of old and new friends and co-workers (Kyle, Sadukie, Mark, Greg, Matt, Hugo, David). It was a blast.

The one drawback to Stir Trek this year was the audio problems. During the first session, there was a reverb of some kind where it sounded like 3 people were talking at once and was hard to focus on the session's content. In the main room, the reverb was horrible, but in the alternative theaters, there was no reverb so I stuck to the secondary theaters.

Eventually, the issue was resolved thanks to the AMC staff. I understand it was a hiccup and these things happen. :-)

Every year, Stir Trek feels like going back to school. Each session lets out and everyone is scurrying to their next "class" while saying 'Hi' to everyone as they pass "in the hallways." hehehe

With that said, a huge thank you to the organizers of Stir Trek! You guys rock putting all of this together every year and making it a success!

Also, a big thank you to AMC Easton theaters and staff for accommodating everyone making this a successful conference this year (again).

Can't wait until next year when we get Avengers: Doomsday! It'll be big!

What was your favorite session? Did you stay for the movie? And do you know why there was an asterisk in the title? Post your comments below and let's discuss.