I recently attended my daughter's middle school band concert. Since the kids are very early in their journey of learning an instrument, the school had requested that some senior high school band members sit in with them. This gave me a flashback to my high school band days as the first chair trumpet player that thought I was better than I really was. I was that person that got to sit in with the middle school band playing Hot Cross Buns. It reminded me how fun it was to play very basic music and concentrate on playing beginner music as well as I possibly could.

Thinking about how fun it is to go back to basics made me realize something interesting that I have done during my tech career. I have presented "Intro to Docker" in multiple talks, presentations and conferences. The slides and demos have changed some over the years but the basic material is the same. It has been recorded multiple times and people can go back and watch the recordings versus me doing the talk again in a live setting. I have also attended multiple conference presentations that are centered around Docker or Container basics.

Why would I attend a talk that is very similar to material I have presented multiple times? Well, to be the person in the back of the room that can't wait to ask a question that I already know the answer. That is why. There is always one of those people in every conference audience. It might as well be me. I am just kidding. The real reason I go to conference talks that I think I am an expert about the subject is to show me that I can always learn something new. I have picked up little nuggets of wisdom from every session that I have attended.

It might be as simple as how the presenter organizes the slides. In one talk I learned that you don't have to include the entire id of a running container when issuing commands. I watched the presenter doing a demo clean up his running containers by issuing a stop command using the first three characters of the id. In the middle of the presentation I blurted out a question without waiting my turn "wait, you can do that?", which I admit makes me that person at the conference as well.

Too many times I think as technologists we constantly strive to work on or build something using the latest, greatest bleeding-edge technology. There is something satisfying about seeing if you can make a java app as clean and simple as possible even if you have created hundreds of them in the past. Take some time to review something that you think you are an expert. Think of it as a coder therapy session. Odds are you are going to enjoy it and probably learn something along the way.