June 8, 2017 Conferences, Uncategorized No comments
WeAreDevelopers 2017 Conference in Vienna
Few weeks ago I went to attend a WeAreDevelopers conference in Vienna. The venue is just 10 minutes walk time from the place where I live.
The official web page for the conference is here and all of the talks can be watched at youtube here.
I will go through all of the talks I watched with a very brief message before giving my thoughts on the organization of the conference.
Day 1
Opening. For such a small country as Austria a conference hosting 3500+ developers is a big deal. Chancellor of Austria (most powerful position) took the keyword and, to my disappointment, for the most part spoke in German. I think this would be fine if only this conference wasn’t advertised as an international conference. In any case it is admirable that importance of IT industry is acknowledged by the Austrian government.
Build a World We All Want to Live. This talk was a lot about the future and exponential growth. I’m afraid there not much of takeaway except of a sense of a motivational inspiration.
Challenges of Autonomous Driving. I first heard about Rimac concept car on TopGear TV Show. It was very interesting to hear about the Croatia’s concept car from engineering perspective. What I learned is that there are a lot more of a challenge that has to be addressed than it is advertised by the car makers such as Tesla, Honda, etc.
IoT & Advanced Analytics – Real World Challenges for Developers. Austrian railway company explaining how they use all kinds of detectors on their trains and how their data is analysed. This does not get anywhere close to using IA, though still interesting.
One ID to Rule Them All. This was supposed to be a presentation on identification methods (think passports, ID cards) but somehow the presenter talked about solar panels, exponential growth of technology, and near free energy. Not sure how these two play together, but the title was definitely misleading.
How Different Open Hardware is to Open Software. Interesting talk, but again misleading title. Speaker presented his robotic arm project and how it can be used by people without an arm. Takeaway: these days you can download some code, buy Arduino and 3D-print yourself an arm within hours.
The Early Days of Id Software: Programming Principles. I found zillion of youtube videos with the same title where Romero gives the same talk on different conferences. Best to watch would be this another video here. He goes through the history of Id-software in the talk. Takeaway: John Romero’s Principles for Programmers
Getting Computers to Understand Us. This was a presentation on NLP and AI that started with punchcards.
How to Design Human Centered Chatbots? Takeaway: I didn’t learn how to design chatbots but I understood that chatboat euphoria is on a downtrend.
The Future of Online Money: Creating Secure Payments Globally. This was about PayPal money transactions and security. Takeway: eliminating middleman helps in improving processes.
Less Process, More Guidance. Takeway: The Atlassian Team Playbook.
Day 2
Extreme Continuous Integration. Automic company presented how they do hundreds of builds of different components for multiple platforms continuously.
Continuous Delivery Journey @ Wirecard. This was more of continuation of CI and CD topic.
Monorepos in the wild. A story of going to one repository. Some pros and cons where presented with a message that monorepo != monoapp.
Rebuilding an Aircraft on the Fly. Yet another story, now about fixing CSS by Trivago company. In my opinion this was just a common sense story.
Javascript @ Netflix. Standards of JS and their life-cycle were explained.
JS @ Uber. About programming languages & architecture approaches at Uber. Things like NodeJs, Go, Python, and micro-services were mentioned in addition to JS.
The Artist and the Machine. A lightning talk about nice spiral graphs. Takeaway: I bought my daughter a spirograph toy.
Working Backwards from the Customer. Amazon explained how they start developing with a press release. If they don’t like what is written it might not make sense to start doing it. If they like what is written and it sounds cool they add more details, create more technical translation and finally this is converted into development. I believe this was my biggest takeaway from the conference in general. In software projects it happens very often that customer does not get what they want. Starting with customer and being obsessed with the customer is probably something that makes Amazon stand out.
Model-Minded Development. A presenter from Google talked about importance of having a good model between computer and the real world.
Customizing Railways to Individuality. National Austrian railroad company talked about their challenges. They are in business for 178 years and can be considered dinosaurs when it comes to software.
Scaling Open Source Communities. Tips and tricks of handling an open source project were given. A lot of insight into OS software lifecycle.
Angular, Google’s Popular Application Framework. A relatively simple demo of Angular framework was given. Takeaway: Angular will last longer than any other JS framework. Let’s see.
PHP in 2017. This was somewhat hilarious talk by the inventor of PHP. He talked about lots of performance improvements that come with PHP7 and how that can “save the planet”. Takeaway: This blog is self-hosted word-press. I upgraded the PHP version to 7 making my contribution to more sustainable future.
Developers Are Writing the Script for the Future. Definitely the highlight of the conference was a presentation by the creator of StackOverflow Joel Spolsky. This was inspirational talk and a great way to close the conference.
Organization and conclusion
Many people have complained about significant overbooking for the conference. It was very unpleasant to see organizers bragging about 3,8K attendees when there was obviously not enough room for all of them. There are some angry tweets and blog posts online, like this one WeAreDevelopers – A Mess of a Conference. I agree. It was very disappointing to find myself in crowd of people and not being able to switch tracks. Basically, if you decided to switch track you would end up somewhere standing on the side not being able to listed or to see. Second day proved to be much-much better, but who knows, maybe, this is because of some people simply decided that this conference is not worth their time?
In my opinion it was the second day that saved the conference. Better talks were delivered at the second day and more comfortable access to stages, food, and company stands was possible.
In any case, I’m really happy that such a big conference was organized in the city where I live now and that many well-known speakers from well-known companies came to talk. There was a lot to learn. I’m looking forward to #WAD2018.
.concat() 2015 conference in Salzburg, Austria
March 30, 2015 Conferences No comments
Disclaimer: I’m white, straight, or better say cissexual, able-bodied, married man and I have a child.
.concat() is new web conference organized by local enthusiasts in Salzburg, Austria. I’ve decided to attend it mainly because it is relatively close to place where I live, it is not expensive and it had few big names.
Biggest of them, of course, was Douglass Crockford, author of “JavaScript: The Good Parts” and important ideological contributor to ECMAScript.
His keynote was mostly shortened version of the talks he usually gives on Javascript and programming in general. You can watch it online. Small difference was that in the end he showed some of the good parts that are coming in ECMA 6 standard. And definitely it is different experience to watch someone alive than watching video.
You can see complete schedule with descriptions here: http://lanyrd.com/2015/concat/schedule/
Next two talks were “Ain’t No Part Like a Third-Party Javascript Party” and “How Teaching Kids Made Me a Better Developer”. I enjoyed two of them for different reasons. First was quick run on all kinds of issues that can be caused by different JS libs in strangest possible ways. It makes you think how dangerous is the world for any code you want to deliver to be used by someone else. Second talk was entertaining and revealing on how kids question things that we take for granted. I’m sure if we trusted less what we write and really find why things work the way they work we would be better developers as well.
Next two I listened to were “Tonight We’re Gonna Code Like It’s 1999: Designing Responsive Emails” and “No RSVP Required: Asynchronous Messaging”. First one was just not for me. I never worked with e-mail templates and I wish I never will. All I understood is that e-mail templating is pain. Didn’t grasp anything useful for myself from that talk at all. Second was list a terribly boring university lection I wish I would have skipped for “Credit Card Walks into a Bar” jokes.
Lunch was good. Nothing too special, typical Austrian lunch, but this is a great plus for the conference.
“No More Tools” was all about the tools. Friend who came with me was expecting that this will be about ways to avoid using tools like VS, or avoiding burden of hundreds of JS libs. Instead it was a whole bunch of tools being recommended for all kinds of things. Although most of the tools make sense I don’t understand how this helps to avoid tools.
“Useful Performance Metrics” was actually useful as we have some performance issues in project I’m working on. Takeaway for me was idea of having performance thresholds that are nothing too specific but should make a team pay attention to performance should any threshold be crossed.
I also liked “Containerized Applications with Docker” very much. Docker is really great tool for doing lots of quick virtualization. Plus this was one of very few presentations with live demo. I’m really glad there are people who have stomach to demo live. This is really appreciated.
“The Meaning of Words” was a depressing talk. Or at least presenter advertised it in such a way. Maybe pace in which it was presented was slow and looked like presenter didn’t do any eye contact with the audience. But talk was about a better programming word. And there was some hope in it.
Then there was a round of lightning talks. But all of them were prepared beforehand. Some of them were quite good as people showed what they worked on. Some were ridiculous or absolutely hilarious as people tried to squeeze so much into 5 minutes. There was one person who tried to demonstrate LED board controlled by some JavaScript. I really wanted to see what it does, but unfortunately the person didn’t manage to control anxiety and things went out of control.
I intentionally mentioned that geek person. I think that introverts, real nerds are having hard time to get better conditions for themselves when it comes to careers and social networking. This leads us to “A Talk About Nothing” which wasn’t about nothing at all. It was about equality and diversity in technology industry. I really liked the way this presentation was delivered. It was a great performance. But I have some disagreements with contents. Lets start with some questions. Are women underrepresented in tech? – Yes. Are women less interested in tech? – I guess, yes. Isn’t it logical that less women work in tech? – Work it out for yourself. I’m of opinion that this is logical. I would honestly like to see more women developers.
I’m of opinion that representation in tech should be proportional and not influenced artificially. Though we should encourage everyone. Should there be more gays and lesbian in tech? Sorry, I use my privilege not to care. I simply don’t want to know if someone is a gay. What does it have to do with tech skills? Should things we do be not discriminating and working well for all people, including disabled. – Of course.
To be honest, I think it is in human nature to care more about self and self-alike than others. Isn’t it how people evolved and survived? I’m convinced that people should tolerate each other and be completely aware of inequality and different minorities and respect them, but I also think that nothing should be taken to any extreme level. In a sense that tolerance has its limits. Would you tolerate a guest who does a mess at your home? Every stick has two ends. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for my daughter being software engineer who lives in a better world where she can travel the world and see no poverty or inequality and where women are equally represented everywhere, but I’m not happy about the world where doing crap to your body or weird behaviour is considered normal.
Unfortunately some feminists will say that I’m just another “wrong” person. That’s why I put that disclaimer at the top so it is clear who wrote this post so in case you are one you can ignore my thoughts.
Overall, conference was very good. I will seriously consider to attend concat 2016 should there be one. I will do better home work on presentations to always be on the right track.
Not attending NDC2014 in Oslo
March 24, 2014 Conferences, Opinion No comments
What a silly title for the post. What if everyone wrote about what they are NOT doing?
Well, I write this blog post partially to convince myself that decision on not attending NDC2014 is right and partially to share my thoughts on such aspects of attending conferences as price and return of investment.
I always wanted to visit some big developer’s conference. One of the conferences that I definitely like is NDC (either in Oslo or London). I think it has best mix of technologies that match my interests and at the same time has big names in it.
I wanted to go there for 4 times. First time I just asked my company in Ukraine, but it would be too expensive for them and I don’t know if they ever sent people to such conferences. Second time I asked company here in Austria, but I was new employee to send me somewhere – I didn’t have a chance to prove that I worth it. Third time I just couldn’t do that because my daughter was about to be born. And this summer I’m not going to allow myself to attend it on my own.
Reason is simple – price. I’ve calculated that it would cost me around 2600 Euro (~3600$) to attend it. This includes tickets for the conference and flights, hotel, food and 3 working days. Organizers wouldn’t give me a discount.
Being self-employed makes you really consider such things as conferences from manager’s or company’s perspective. You start to think about return of investment and how to justify conference attendance. Real question is if money spent on conference will benefit you correspondingly.
NDC videos are available online shortly after conference. It is not a secret that what people get from conferences is not content of presentations but possibility to establish relations with gurus who are at the top in the industry. I heard this so many times. One of my old friends said that conference really starts when presentations are over and people get together at lunch or dinner or at party.
Taking this into account it is very hard for me to believe that I could establish good connections at any conference. I’m usually shy, especially when it comes to social events and new connections. I don’t think that I’m only one who has this problem. Probably most of developers to some extend have similar issues. I found some articles on how you can attend conferences as yourself. But point that I’m trying to make is that usually it is company that pays for their employees therefor developers are not that much concerned about the price and of course they are happy to attend. I would also be happy if someone paid for me. Some say that conferences are often just a reward for best developers for being loyal to their companies.
I concluded for myself that from learning perspective I would not gain much from this conference and from networking perspective it doesn’t worth so much money. Of course there is tiny chance that I’m overlooking some big opportunity.
I believe that if I spend just half of those money on small conferences and tools/learning I will get more in return.
This beginner’s guide to attending conferences is quite useful. I think I will use some of the provided hints when I’ll be attending smaller conferences.
One last thing, probably ultimate goal for any attendee of any conference is to grow to the level when you are invited as one of key speakers.
Professional .NET 2012 – Vienna, Austria
September 24, 2012 Conferences No comments
On September 14, 2012 I attended conference for .NET developers here in Vienna, called Professional .NET 2012.
I’m very glad that company has sent me to this conference. Well, it was not any kind of exclusive and expensive conference somewhere abroad, but rather excellent money for value event for employees, who like to improve their professional skills. When I just started I asked about going to Oslo for NDC, which is awesome conference. For new developer it was bit too over budget and I understand it – who knows, maybe in reality I’m crap-code writer, which shall be fired the next morning.
Conference took place in some hotel, and from what I understood, not cheap one. So accordingly it resulted in great tasty lunch. This is always a big plus for any conference. Despite it was called “Professional .NET” I have seen a lot of young people which didn’t seem to have years of experience at all. If I were student I wouldn’t take much out of that day.
Intro and 2 side talks were in German, so I cannot say anything about those, for me it was boring. All other sessions were in English.
Two special presenters were invited and they were core for the conference.
Ayende Rahien just turned all things upside-down. Whatever you learnt from any smart patterns books older than few years is just not acceptable. Everything could be written in very simple manner with depth averaging 4. True or false?
Personally I liked very much the way Ayende presented stuff and how he talked about things and also that he made people think. Even flow of his speech was like some continuing brainstorm. What I didn’t like completely is that he is very concentrated only on one side of the problem, talking like all software is just about reading data from database. Yes, I say something against known Ayende, because I’m sure he shows only one side of the coin. Besides, he likes to blame other people, so why not other people blame him a bit.
If you don’t know Ayende, for sure you have heard about his projects. Oren (his real name) has written Rhino Mocks, RavenDB, NhibernateProfier and contributed to tons of open source projects.
Sebastien Lambla was another special guest. To be honest, I’ve never heard about him before (but I realize now that I read his posts time-to-time). Apparently he has contributed a lot to open source and community, as people, who attended with me knew about him. You maybe heard about OpenWrap or OpenRasta. I just went though this interview with him, to understand more about what he does. Steve Ballmer, you should finally respond him with Microsoft’s vision on open-source!
It was interesting conference, but not a revolution.
My talk at #kievaltnet about NHibernate internals
December 4, 2011 Conferences, NHibernate, Presentation, Success 2 comments
Friday I’ve been in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. At the beginning of the day me with my wife visited couple of shops to buy some special things my wife makes. And than we went to have a good sit in small restaurant till 7 PM. I had to finish up my presentation…
Recently I’ve mentioned that I will be speaking at Kiev ALT.NET. So this post is about it.
Kiev ALT.NET
Kiev ALT.NET is great group of smart people willing to learn interesting things in .net but maybe from deeper standpoint than standard .net user groups do. I’ve been having good conversations in twitter with @chaliy and once we met at UnetaPlus in Kharkiv where he invited me as speaker to the @kievaltnet. Peliminary we agreed on something about NHibernate.
The topic
I knew that I have to prepare something interesting on NHibernate. But what? There are dozen of articles on it, there are many videos available. Topic just came itself. You might know that I’ve been working with NH for long time already and that I’ve written something similar to ORM so I decided that getting some insight into NHibernate’s guts would be really interesting.
Presentation delivery
So before 7 PM I got to the Ciklum office (building on the left). Landscapes from the 20th floor are astonishing, especially at night.
Not sure if I was enough prepared, but at least I felt that guys were listening to me very-very attentively. Some of them twitted simultaneously (@alexbeletsky, @skalinets, @korneliuk) and had good laugh. At least I invented term “swiss breakpoint” (aka. conditional breakpoint with cross).
Also I tried to joke much, but it didn’t go as well as I expected it to, guess because of sleepless night and general tiredness. Also I spoke with accent (as per them o_O. Never thought I have any kind of accent of my native language).
Presentation itself
View more presentations from Andriy Buday.
I would like to thank all guys, who came to listen to me and other presenters. Thanks for having me at Kiev ALT.NET. It had been great time and I would like to be there once again despite reason (to speak or to listen).
Mobile Professional Days in Kharkiv – it was fun time
November 21, 2011 Conferences No comments
Passed weekend I’ve been at Mobile Professional Days conference in Kharkiv (again).
Shortly conference worth time I spent for it, but not that much because of the information I got there, but rather more because spending lot of time with my friends. We had to travel overall about 40 hours. We had two laptops (one air), two kindles two iPads, one iPhone and one HTC wp7 to play with. True geeks in occasionally-connected environment, called train, and then not so starry hotel as it should have been. Reading books while travelling and tweeting much during conference itself brought feeling of not wasting time. Ah, and of course tasty coffee-breaks were awesome.
Really nice and modern monument at the entrance of Kharkiv university hosting conference. Cool!
Some other photos from conference itself can be seen here.
My thoughts on each presentation
Now, let’s be more serious. I will be critical in this post, so don’t share this with speakers :).
I will list only those presentations I’ve attended. (Also as conference was in Russian, I’m translating titles of presentations so sorry if I translated not as you like.)
1. Flexible methodologies for Mobile projects
Honestly it was completely not I wanted to hear here. It was simply well organized presentation about usual methodologies used in every day that can be applied to any project. Distributed teams, scrum, team work and people motivation are general topics not specific to Mobile. Only one thing I liked was about having phones for each developer.
2. iOS development, first steps
Ok, this one was about its topic and overall very interesting despite I didn’t know a lot of things about iOS.
3. Mobile games – development is just half of the deal
Great presentation and great presenter. Real game publisher talked around pitfalls and other stuff you have to overcome to make your game successful in your marketplace. There were some real examples, statistics. Was really very interesting to listen to this man.
4. Game “Stay alive in mobile”
Blonde (Olga, sorry) went though good and bad examples of design for applications. She let everyone know that you have to take into account dozen of variables to create really usable application. You should even think about length of users nails. I think this presentation was great and easy for consumption.
5. Best of the XCode 4.2 and iOS 5.0 from the developers view
I didn’t get this presentation. Definitely because I know nothing about iOS and XCode. Anyway, at least it is useful to feel myself a stupid idiot time to time.
6. How to make good and mobile in one bottle
Guy from JetBrains, discussed different design approaches for the iOS and Android phones. He touched many interesting aspects of designing good applications. I was bit disappointed that he didn’t say much about new metro style in wp7. I think it is great and not everyone caught it yet.
7. RESTfull iOS with RestKit
This sucked! No, really. I understand that another person had to substitute original presenter, but why wasn’t he ready and why slides had tons of code. Crap, not presentation. Message to presenter: don’t be disappointed by what I said, you had hard time so you know next time you have to perform 100 times better. I’ve been in similar situation and it sucked as well, but I had auditory 10-20 times smaller.
8. Evolution of mobile apps. Though Could and Social into Mobile 2.0
This presentation was as manna from the heaven after REST-laugh. I got a lot of interesting information on social integration. Auditory had some fun when on slide appeared app for gays.
9. Guidelines isn’t limitation
How getting slightly away from official UI guidelines can take you out of the crowd of the other apps. Presenter showed great examples when new awesome design was born because of this. Also he gave good feedback about metro design for wp7 and well-documented guidelines.
10. How to speed up and reduce the cost of developing mobile apps
Maybe the best presentation and delivery. It was smooth and easy to listening to. At this presentation I got some feeling of HTML 5 as the future for the mobile development.
Fun with tweets
Great that there was twitter board. It kept good mood even when it started to be boring. To help you feel general atmosphere during the #mpdays2011 below are my tweets chronologically (you have to be able to read Ukrainian):
At #mpdays2011 in Kharkiv. Hope it worth trip over 1000 km.
#mpdays2011 Перекличка. Я #wp7! Хто ще?
#mpdays2011 Не хочу бути занудою але всі ці речі загальні для будь якого типу розробки. Де спицифіка розробки під мобільні платформи. #q
@caxarock #mpdays2011 Scrum це гнучка методологія. :)
#mpdays2011 О! Останній слайд із пляжем мені сподобався.
@UkrDaddy А не по кількості людей? Там цікаво про #wp7? #mpdays2011
Ситуація із кнопкою не того розміру або не там дуже знайома. #mpdays2011
За якоюсь історією мало бути 42 а не 7. #mpdays2011
А нашим клієнтам радять тримати телефон на зарядці в автомобілі поки вони виконують роботу. :) #mpdays2011
Таке враження що на #mpdays2011 одні студенти. А де бородаті дядіньки?
@eGoOki ти мене заплутав. Я #wp7 прийнов на #ios і був певен, що там цікавіше. #mpdays2011 хм…
Хочу побакланити презентацію по restkit. Що за слайди із тууучою коду? І що він там говорить… КАПУТ!#mpdays2011
#mpdays2011 Презентеру влаштували інтерв’ю. Таке враження, що ті хто запитують знають відповіді. Тупо фейл…
Музику врубали, щоб блондинка із першого ряду станцювала. Єуех… Давай! #mpdays2011
Про #cloud і #social цікаво. Принаймні Тарас доповідає впевнено! #mpdays2011
@Alokard #mpdays2011 Якщо доповідач толковий, то твітеряни це помічають. Не було б сміття в ленті.
At #mpdays#2011 I understood that the coolest platform is #wp7 not because of presentations, but because of using actual phone here!
Listening to #iOS UI guidelines. I think #metro in #wp7 is much better. #mpdays2011 (I know ’cause I’m using it & it rocks.)
Нас зомбують 25тим кадром із сіськами :) #mpdays2011
Man called C# a bubble! O_o Java isn’t bubble than? #mpdays2011 Crap is it going to be HTML and JS?
Thanks for reading…
Speaking at Kiev ALT.NET
November 18, 2011 Conferences No comments
I’m going to speak at Kiev ALT.NET preliminary at 2 of December.
I would like to share some of my knowledge and findings around NHibernate from its inner perspective.
NHibernate from inside
“I have been working with NHibernate for manner of couple of years and I never seriously thought about how it is built from inside, what is the architecture of NH, how much it depends on ADO.NET, how they made reflection to work fast, how high code quality is, which people worked on it and what was the history of it. The other day, I had chance to start mine own small ORM project and all of this questions raised for me. Thus I will do my best to share everything I discovered in NHibernate surgery.” – Andriy Buday
NHibernate зсередини
“Вже декілька років я працюю із NHibernate і ніколи серйозно не задумувався як він побудований зсередини, яка його архітектура, наскільки сильно він використовує ADO.NET, яким чином уся рефлекція працює швидко, на скільки якісним є код, які люди працювали над ним та яка була його історія. Надавно я мав шанс розпочати невеличкий ORM проект і всі ці питання згадані вище стали надзвичайно цікавими для мене.
Тому буду викладатися на максимум, щоб поділитися усіми відкриттями хірургії нутрощів NHibernate.” – Андрій Будай
Лінк на профіль такий: http://andriybuday.com
Uneta Plus
October 8, 2011 Conferences 2 comments
Week ago I had a chance to be at one of the best Ukrainian conferences for the recent time. Awesome conference, awesome presenters, awesome people, awesome uneta plus.
Conference was far from my home in faraway city Kharkiv. I’ve been there once, when delivering MEF talk last year at ITJam2010. Even location kept the same:
Now more on conference itself. It started with keynote from two maybe most known ms guys in Ukraine – Dmitriy Nikonov and Serhiy Baidachni.
I cannot say that keynote was structured and well organized speech, it was more improvising, but having those two guys rescued it. They definitely are not new in field of presenting something, so auditory listened with attention, and all get acquainted with what’s next. Especially I really enjoyed stuff now available in TFS. It is getting matured over time.
Following presentation I attended was about Silverlight and XNA and how they live together in WP7 Mango. It wasn’t deep dive into things in Silverlight or XNA, but I enjoyed observing small UFO flying thought the auditory (background was transmitted from phone camera).
“Every game consists with 3-4 parts at each level. They are load and unload. Between those is while loop that has two calls – update game world and render game world.” – said Alex Golesh*. Now in WP 7.5 we can render both Silverlight and XNA in same application. I found this msdn page well informative.
Sharepoint for internet sites gives good business solution. I was able to see Sharepoint in action. Marat showed how we can start with file->new project and proceed to completed site, designed in sharepoint designer. Also some bits about authorization and authentication in sharepoint, and I felt like I’m guru in sharepoint… NO! I still think it is complex and not clear, but Microsoft actively pushes this product. Personally I think, that even if it is great product, it is not something that you would want to listen at programmers conference.
Lunch. Oh yeah, I really appreciate guys, who organized this event, as I could eat tasty (no really!) food without leaving conference. I guess money I paid for conference has something to do with taste of food, but believe me – it worth to pay more and get normal food.
I also attended presentation on entity framework, which consisted with two parts and was delivered in English by Diego Vega. Man, if you are reading this, you have to know – you rocked! I found this presentation to be best structured and most fulfilled with information on its topic.
Also I’m bit disappointed that I didn’t saw that amazing luster of Dmitriy Kostylev. Everyone who was in section 2 listening to him were literally excited. Ah… sad I missed that hardcore SQL optimization wisdom.
Another thing made this event different – so called “round table”. All of the speakers were gathered at the scene answering questions from auditory. I enjoyed this part as well, but left before the end, as I had train back to home.
Organizers of even asked few times about feedback. They want to hear more about what can be improved in this event, what was great and what wasn’t that much great. Here are few of my subjective thoughts:
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Lower price a bit. I think more people will attend if price would be something more moderate, but who knows… you tried to balance between number of attendees and price, not me. I was frustrated about showroom not being full.
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How about more sections, so I can choose if I get overview of sharepoint, tfs, or if I get flood of hardcore wp7 stuff. I just want more clear vision on what I can grasp from one or other presentation, because in some topics I feel myself confident and need advanced level, respectively in some I need introductory level.
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Personally I would like to see more foreigners, like Diego. I don’t know if it is hard to have them on event, but if you bring someone like Hanselman, I bet I will visit you even I have to pay more and travel longer.
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I’m not sure it worth complaining but why not Kyiv?
Despite of what I listed above uneta plus really was different sort of event of those I visited ever before because of extremely awesome presenters and great organization. Well done!
* This is how I remembered his words. I don’t promise I didn’t misinterpret something.
LvivIT #0 – it was awesome!
September 17, 2011 Conferences No comments
Yet another time, I’m on .net community conference in Lviv again. This time LvivIT. You know what makes me happy about this? It is understanding that such events are happening more and more often and they become more mature in my native city. Presenters are more and more known guys. This also makes me think that we start witnessing something that is more common to big cities in USA, cities that have few or more technology user groups. At least now I know that we are moving in the right direction. Cool.
This event welcomed presenters from other cities of Ukraine. Below I’m going to list some of my and only my thoughts on all of presentations, without mentioning names of presenters.
1. This man simply rocks, he had absolutely another style of presenting. He doesn’t follow any kind of agenda and even doesn’t have presentation. He simply started with throwing two iPads into auditory with his app started on it. Application is game, that scored first place in marketplace for some period of time, thus man simply has up to 20K per day, and he is delivering his story of success to us. Main thing I got from this presentation is that if you want to succeed, you have to work on things you like and don’t compromise with different bulshit surrounding you. He ended presentation with no special attention to the audience, but started finishing soup he brought instead of lunch (in between of what? or doesn’t he have enough time to eat normally?). Everyone expressed much interest in this person and his game. I saw how much he is proud of it, when he had words with interested guys after presentation. This really inspires.
2. Second presentation was about html4 and html5 & further future of HTML and web technologies, so called web 3.0. During this presentation I got what it means when there is person in audience that takes all words of speaker into criticism and then simply gives hard time to presenter. They almost yelled at each other.
3. Believe me or not, but there was presentation on Agile, when guy said nothing about Agile itself, but gave everyone know that it really works. “AGILE! Yes!” He showed example of SorceForge implementing agile and succeeding. Another portion of presentation were results of surveys on if agile really works. From this presentation I’ve learned about another way of presenting material.
4. I’ve also learned, that presenters have to be ready before the presentation, and not show that they are not up to speed with stuff. Even when you joke about preparing some slide hour ago, you have to cover it with your deep knowledge… Or at least it is my personal thought. Ok, maybe that is because I’m experienced in material of topic presented on fourth presentation.
5. “Silverlight is not dead” first words given from him, latest presenter. He talked about features that will be added to Silverlight 5, like multicolumn text, multi-click, XAML extensions, ancestor, elevated trust, and in-browser elevated trust, graphics improvements, multicore usage, vector printing, 3D with XNA. Also presenter showed known slide on future of SL and Windows 8 with green and blue divisions of world :). Personally I liked this presentation because it clearly and honestly listed things coming in SL. I even think that one of the features can be utilized in project I’m working on now.
To summarize, I want to say that this event really was awesome! I enjoyed it very much! Well done, guys, especially Dima and sponsor and of course presenters!
