Peter Gomori giving a talk on CodeBEAM Lite Amsterdam 2019
Visiting conferences, big or small is a great way to take a break from your everyday work focus area and have a wider look at what’s happening around the world. Listening to talks live sparks questions and inspires discussions. Discussions help connect with new people in your area or find out about surprising new use cases, ventures, ideas. That’s why we, at Appliscale take time to visit these events, everyone of their likings. Let’s hear from four of our team members about their experiences.
Code::Dive Wrocław 2019
Code::Dive is a programming conference organised by Nokia. This year the conference took place on November 20-21 in Kino Nowe Horyzonty, Wrocław. Code::Dive is focused mainly on C++, but there were some interesting Python talks as well. I decided to go there when I’ve found out that Jason Turner will be giving a talk. He is creating a Youtube series I’m following – C++ Weekly. He gave an excellent talk about swapping around approach to good coding practices and instead of following best practices look for code smells. Another great talks I recommend you to watch when they will be posted on Code::Dive Youtube channel are Barbara Geller and Ansel Sermersheim speaking about undefined behaviour and Andrzej Krzemieński explaining Preconditions, postconditions and invariants.
Meeting C++ Berlin 2019
The word on the street is that C++ community is getting older, with 20+ years of experience veterans are massively outnumbering younger, less conservative programmers. Meeting C++ conference held in Berlin contradicts this sentiment. This annual event that focuses on a language, that is regarded as one of the hardest to get into, and thus feared by students across the globe, showed that not only there are younger members of this community, but also that they are not afraid to discuss any topics with experts from C++ Standardization Committee.
Talks were ranging from beginner-friendly introductions to new language features and debugging techniques, to deep dives in low-level concurrency primitives, and real-time programming. Central keynote presented by Frances Buontempo of ACCU Overload Journal was discussing if an AI can replace programmers in the future. If you’re interested in C++ or programming in general, I can’t really recommend watching the talks on YouTube highly enough.
WebSummit Lisbon 2019
WebSummit is an annual technology conference held in Lisbon, considered one of the largest tech events in the world. Since I’m staying in Lisbon, I had the pleasure to attend it during the first week of November. All the discussions were interesting, with CEOs of big companies, famous or important people but I found several of them worth mentioning. Apart from technology, the main topic was the influence of huge corporations whose value is already becoming similar to a small country – should we be afraid of losing democracy, when the companies become more powerful than countries? Also, on one of the pitch talks, there was presented a company ‘Be right back’ with an idea of having holidays subscription – users paying every month for having organized 3 free trips per year. Last, but not least Founder & CEO from Boston Dynamics presented live the possibilities of one of the robots available – Spot. It was an awesome experience to see the robot performing live.
CodeBEAM Lite Amsterdam 2019
Erlang and Elixir are two niche, lesser known languages. Erlang Solutions regularly teams up with local communities to organise smaller “Lite” (one day, one track) conferences in various cities. This November CodeBEAM Lite Amsterdam took place the second time. I was happy to see a quite versatile lineup this year, including advanced topics like metaprogramming in Erlang, optimising string processing in Elixir or Erlang-style tracing for Perl. This is a sign that the Elixir community is getting more and more mature. The advantage of these smaller events (attended by around 100 people) is that they feel more like a cozy, family gathering, and every time I see more and more familiar faces.
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The huge conferences are great to see live the biggest “stars” in the industry and hear about the great trends and what are the next big things. While on small events you are able to meet and get to know more about the folks you might otherwise only interact with on mailing lists and github issues throughout the year. It feels like a big class reunion.
