Last Friday (20th of September 2013) I was at the DevDay conference in Krakow, Poland. This was a free event, but - in my humble opinion - it could easily compete with the paid ones and it would probably won.
First of all, the conference organizers invited well known and good speakers. Second there was superior service (lots of good food and drinks) and a crew willing to help (cheers for the debugging team!). Ending on the enthusiastic participants.
The conference started at 8am and took whole day. Expect the first and the last talk, two sessions were taking place simultaneously.
I’ve attended to those:
- “Back to basics: the mess we’ve made of our fundamental data types” by Jon Skeet
A funny presentation about how even simple things in programming (like float, string, date and time types) can be complex when you use them without understanding. Additional benefit: you could see how Jon spoke with “Tony the pony” ;)
- “Implementing Continuous Delivery” by Patrick Kua
An introduction to the continuous delivery subject - what it is, how to use it and what are the benefits. I had some basics about CD, so it was interesting for me.
- “Guerilla Framework Design” by Andreas Håkansson
One of the creators of the Nancy framework talked about how simple and clever design “tricks” can encourage developers to use API their created. This talk gave me few ideas and I will definitely use them in my code.
- “Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products” by Ben Hall
If you think about a startup, then this talk is for you. Simplifying the essence, you should focus on creating product fast and evaluating it in real world - waiting one year (or even more) with the release isn’t a good idea. I’ve listened this talk with the enjoyment.
- “Full-text search with Lucene and neat things you can do with it” by Itamar Syn-Hershko
I’m Lucene user at work and I’ve also learned about searching during my studies, the first part of the talk was not so interesting for me, but the second part about Elastic Search makes that I’m very happy that I attended to this session. Itamar is one of the Apache Lucene contributor and a good speaker, so I recommend watching this talk.
- “The Architecture of StackOverflow” by Marco Cecconi
An overview about architecture of a site, that every developer probably know (and if not, then he should!). You could learn some interesting facts about the team and the way they create this great website.
- “The software journeyman’s guide to being homeless and jobless.” by Rob Ashton
An inspiring, funny and probably too short talk about Rob’s one year journey during which he met people, coded and drank ;) I have to say that Rob has lot’s of charisma and is a very good speaker, so you listen him with the real pleasure. Be aware: if you’re Belgian then this talk probably isn’t for you ;)
I’m very happy that I was invited for this conference and I hope I will be there in the next year. One more time thank you guys for creating such a great event!
