There is nothing more interesting than to put a large group of people who code in a large room about a common system for them to code in. 

That’s Blackboard’s DevCon, a convention for developers of the Blackboard platform to come together, network, and share ideas.

Blackboards over the last year have taken a rather interesting turn, they realized the importance of user groups and put a heavy focus on them, calling this the Blackboard Community.

I belong to two groups in the BBCommunity section, the admin group since that is about 30% of my job and the developer group, which about 50% of my job function.

DevCon allows me to meet many members whom I have been interacting virtually for the last year and to put a face to a name or a body to a floating head.

Obviously some people a famous, like the Bb Code guru and BB code poet, responsible for the brand new REST API. 

Or Marrisa D. who is like the caretaker of the community. 

One thing I have learn over the years is that being unable to read someone’s body language I tend to remain mute, especially when it comes to things that I believe may make others hate me as they can’t tell my intentions without emotion or body language either. However, in person I share my true thoughts on the a topic as I can sense when to throttle back a certain conversation based on the other person’s reactions. 

My thoughts on the REST API were fully shares with these two. It is nothing bad, in fact I told them I am very excited. The reason is because of my job function, I happen to be the responsible for two Learning Management Systems, their company’s and one of their rivals, D2L’s. I shared with them a use case I did on the D2L platform, using Valence. Basically I am hoping that Blackboard’s goal is to do a bb version of Valence, in which case will enhance many people’s lives.

There is great potential in this API!