Category: Speaking

DevDay DevConf is my favourite day! Potentially…

The first programming conference I fell in love was DevDay. It really opened my eyes when I went there for the first time in 2012 and it never failed to satisfy – I wrote about it multiple times. DevDay won’t be organized this year, or maybe even won’t be organized, period. But don’t worry – Michał and Rafał (together with other awesome people) are starting a new conference. I invite you to DevConf!

DevConf logo

I sent two talks for the CFP and both have been accepted. So I’m super happy, and also a bit stressed – this is going to be the first time I’m doing two talks at the same conference. Both new. Challenge accepted!

The first talk will be related to my growing in recent years interested in Machine Learning. I’ll try to explain basics of the technicalities of training and evaluating ML models in approachable ways. You’re probably gonna be disappointed how easy it is to get a relatively good working model. I hope to get you interested enough, that you won’t surrender when the first obstacles show up.

The second talk will be about my other fascination. How computers actually work? I’ll start with what most programmers know the best these days – one of the high-level programming languages. From there I’ll explore what lays beneath, what layers built up over last few decades. We’re standing on arms of the giants of the past and it’s a good thing to appreciate it.

DevConf is held on 13-15th September in Kraków, Poland. It’s less than a 2hrs flight from most places in Europe. One day of workshop and two days of three tracks talks for very affordable price. Make sure you stay for the weekend – traditionally we have a lot of fun there also after the conference. Register here! Hope to see you there!

DevSum 2015

I’m right now on in Arlanda airport, coming back from DevSum 2015. It was my first DevSum, and it was awesome.
Conference had two days and four tracks. Everything conveniently located in central Stockholm at hotel Clarion Sign. Very close to central station and places for evening activities. The atmosphere was very friendly. I met well known faces from speaker community and made some new friendships. It was most social conference I attended this year, very much similar to how DevDay feels. Most of the speakers didn’t sit in the close “speaker’s lounge”, but mingled with attendees, all led by Tibi, the King of DevSum :).
I didn’t attend many talks, but there were few very intersting. Among them Mark Rendle’s C# 6 talk, Troy Hunt’s and Niall Merrigan’s security talks and Hadi’s “silver bullet” talk. There was also Rob Ashton rant about how Erlang is awesome, but I’m not sure he convinced anybody showing mostly his console scrolling with loads of code and hard to understand error messages flying around. But it was hillarious so that’s ok.
My talk went fairly well. It was another installment of the talk I did at Swettugg and LambdaDays. I had around 30 people on public and I hope they got interested by type providers. Big thanks to Tibi and Cornerstone for this opportunity. Slides and code are on github.

Month of spreading F# love in Poland

In last month or so I did three talks on F# in Poland. I can see gaining interests and there’re already other people speaking about F# in Polish community. This is awesome!

Kraków, 25th September

A Day before DevDay KGD.NET organized meetup with two talks. This was great opportunity for my employer tretton37 to get some more street cred in Poland, so we decided to sponsor some food and drinks. There were two speakers – me and Maciej Aniserowicz, who’s kind of a rock star of Polish .NET community (BTW, check out his new podcast (in Polish)). I did my already well known introduction talk to F#. I had quite a big audience (around 100 people) and they were very engaged. I enjoyed great question and feedback I got after the talk. Looks like it’s very active .NET group. I used the same slides and code as in Warsaw couple months before.

Next dey was a DevDay :). I’m big fan of this conference and it delivered again. There were a lot of semi-negative opinions on the Internet afterwards, which is very sad and unfair. Looks like DevDay became victim of its own success. Last year was fuckin awesome, and people had some overgrown expectations. The truth is, it was fuckin awesome again this time and I can’t wait for next year’s edition. Videos are already online and you can watch them on youtube. But the strongest point of DevDay for me is community impact. It made largely distributed Polish .NET scene more united. People are visiting each other’s group and exchange experiences and knowledge. Programmers from all around Poland know each other better and lot’s of credit for that goes to Michał and Rafał.

Interwebz, 18th October

On Saturday evening I did a talk on Polish virtual conference dotnetconf.pl. From statistics I could see there were about 70 people watching it live. It’s a little bit weird to talk to computer without seeing your audience. I’m not happy how this talk went, but you can judge by yourself, because it’s been recorded (Polish). Feedback I got afterwards kind of matched my expectations – 24 positive, 16 neutral and 2 negative opinions. Again – same slides and code as in Warsaw.

This was the second edition of dotnetconfpl, great initiative by Michał, Paweł and Jakub. It’s Saturday afternoon full of code. Made by Polish developers for Polish developers. And because it was virtual, I could do talk from my desk in Sweden. I also very enjoyed discussions that went on whole day on dedicated jabbr channel.

Poznan, 30th October, PolyConf

Few days ago I did completely new talk. This time about cross-platform mobile development with F# and Xamarin. So this was new talk, and also my first talk in English, and biggest audience so far. Lot’s of new experiences. I was quite nervous before, but seems like everything went well. I’ll see video in a couple of days to make sure, but right now I feel it was my best talk so far.

The conference itself is evolution of well known RuPY. This time they widen topics to other programmic languages, so you could witness talks on JavaScript, Haskell, Erlang or F#. Pretty cool experience, and lot’s of inspiration how to move concept from other technologies to my daily job. The conference, even though it was hosted in Poland, gathered mostly international crowd. I’m putting it on my calendar for next year, because really enjoyed it.

What’s really cool and makes me happy, there’re other people who start talking about F# in Polish community. Few weeks ago my friend Kuba Walinski asked me if he can reference my talk, as he’s gonna do his own about F#. Hell yeah, you can. It’s great that we’re spreading F# love :). He spoke at Developer Days in Wrocław and you can read his thoughts about it on his blog.

There’re some other F# events coming up in Poland, so I’m thinking about starting some kind of Polish Monthly F# news, similar to Sergey’s weekly news, but focusing on our local community. Stay tuned :).

Talking F# in Warsaw

Two weeks ago I had another opportunity to practice my public speaking skills. It took me some time to write this post, because in the meantime I spent few days in Krakow. And Krakow is a different state of mind.

This was another instance of my introductory talk to F#. It went a little better than one on get.net, but still I think there’re things to improve. I got really good feedback from Gutek, who came to see this talk. There were also some other friends from Warsaw – some of them I haven’t seen for years. It was a pleasent surprise.

Warsaw .NET usergroup seems to be similar size to one in Gdansk. There were about 40 people attending. Interesingly, some of them came there for the first time, just because of the topic. Good news that F# is getting some interest in Poland. I got best ever set of question after this session. You could clearly see people are interested and want to know more. Really liked that!

What I didn’t like is that there were no networking activities afterwards. Fortunatelly, there were some friends mentioned before, so we went for some food and drinks. Overally good time, and I’m happy I managed to get there on my way to Kraków.

On the bonus note, I had with me ticket for leetspeak to raffle. Leetspeak is tretton37‘s conference, that we organize every autumn. This year it’s happening on 4th October in Gothenburg. Tickets will be available soon.

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As usually, slides and demos landed on Github.

There are also good news. I’m doing new F# talk, focused more on cross-platform capabilities. Looks like I will present it on PolyConf and WarmCroc in next few months. I’m excited and terrified at the same time, because they’re gonna be my biggest speaking gigs.

Speaking – “WTF# and why should you care” at get.net conference in Łódź

Nearly two weeks ago I had my first opportunity to speak at a conference. Get.net was organized by Łódź branch of Sii and featured all kinds of talk about .net technologies. Among the speakers you could find many familiar and well known faces from Polish dev scene like Maciej Aniserowicz, Jakub Gutkowski, Basia Fusińska, Michał Śliwoń or Rafał Legiędź. I was humbled and honored to speak in such company.

Speaking at conference isn’t much different than speaking at user group. There were just more people and I had to use microphone. Unfortunately it was the kind of mike you have to hold in your hands and this made live coding quite a challenge. Many other speakers had that issue and I hope organizers will know better next time. Apart from that, conference was quite well organized. Also venue was really nice.

My talk was slightly modified version of one I did for tricity .net group last month. But this didn’t make me feel more confident about it. After all it went quite well and there were even some positive tweets. This is good, right? I hope this sparked some interest for F# in Polish .net community. Overall this was nice experience, and I will actively look for other chances to speak at conferences.

Slides and code are on my github.

BTW, I’m writing this post during Craft Conference in Budapest. I’ll do some writeup next week.

Speaking – “WTF# and why should you care” at Tricity .NET Group meetup

Last week during local .net group meetup I did my first technical talk ever. Well, I did present some stuff on internal meetings in company before, but never for so many people, whom I don’t know.

I was quite nervous before – for many reasons. First of all, I’m not some F# guru. I don’t feel fully entitled to share knowledge about it. I also don’t feel very confident in public speaking situations. But it all come around nicely. I’m generally satisfied how it went.

I’m presenting it again in one month at get.net conference in Łódź, Poland. Based on this experience, I will change few things in this talk. But in general, this was good training.

If you have doubts “should I present something at usergroup”, JUST GO DO IT. But before read Zach Holman’s hints on speaking.io. I found them very useful.

Slides from this presentation are on my github. Code examples I used, were mostly from tryfsharp.org.