Tag: buildstuff

Polish dev community is in great shape.

I mentioned some time ago, that fall will be eventful. But I didn’t know about all the events. Everyday I learn about something new, and most of it looks really impressive.

During last two weeks I attended two really well organized events. First one on 12th October. This day I planned to be at leetspeak (BTW – videos are already uploaded) in Sweden, but due some health issues I had to stay home. But there were more than one backup options. There was Warsjawa (name is nice play on polish name of Warsaw – Warszawa and Java) – full day of workshop on various JVM related topics. Not for everyone, but agenda looked solid – lot’s of interesting topics. Oskar was there on some Scala workshop. I hope, he’ll do some writeup ;)

After all I chose dotNetConfPL, which was virtual conference – as name suggests – focused on .net stack. Virtual means, that session were presented on Google Hangouts (live!), and you could comment/ask questions/interact with speakers on Twitter and JabbR channel. It didn’t have this nice part of interacting with live people between and after the sessions, but there were some upsides. You could do your dishes and cook dinner while learning some unit testing stuff (ncrunch is awesome) or JavaScript magic.  All speakers were Polish (or at least they spoke Polish), but they did their talks from various parts of the world. Level of presentation was very high. Generally I was impressed, how professionally it all looked and how smoothly all worked out. Huge respect to Michał, Paweł and Jakub who organized whole event. To see how it all worked behind the scenes and see recorded sessions look at Jakub’s blog.

On next Saturday I went to Meet.js summit which took place in Gdansk – my home area. I follow Meet.js meetings for some time, but they did never fit my schedule until now. Usually meet.js consist of 2-3 talks somehow connected with JavaScript. But summit was full day conference, with food, coffee and afterparty. I won’t talk about presentations, because JS is not really my thing. I enjoyed some of them, I didn’t understand other. But whole conference was again super professional from the organisation point of view. My teammate who writes lots of  JS said, that talks were solid and well prepared.  Venue (Amber Expo – conference center next to Gdansk Football Arena) is awesome. Really nice, spacey rooms for conference and great area to mingle between sessions. I also met few friends from University and spent Saturday surrounded by passionate devs. Love it!

If you count in DevDay which took place about month ago, this shows that Polish developer’s community is in great shape. This makes me very happy.

Especially, that’s not the end. This weekend Łódż will be packed with great events. Starting on Friday with .NET user group meeting and then Mobilization conf on Saturday (free as free beer, and there are still tickets available). Then on 16th November Makerland is organizing meetup for hardware geeks. If you like to play around with Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Mindstorm, this will be interesting for you. And of course there’s Øredev in Malmo and Build Stuff in Vilnius, which both will be invaded by quite big polish crews.

So, don’t stay at home – find an event that fits you and get some knowledge!

Fall will be eventfull

Fall is usually period packed with great conferences. Summer is slowly coming to an end and it’s time to plan, which of them are you going to attend. I put my small list of events worth considering, which are “in the area” during next few months.

Devday
When: 20th September
Where: Krakow, Poland
Sessions: http://devday.pl/Agenda
Registration: http://devday.pl/Register

Devday is one day event, 2 tracks, 12 speakers. It’s free, courtesy of ABB. Registration is open till 8pm today, so that’s last chance to fill registration form. Get creative, because attendees will be selected based on those answers. Lineup is already very impressive, although not everything has been reveled yet. Last year was a blast, and I can’t wait to go there this year too.

Leetspeak
When: 12th October
Where: Stockholm, Sweden
Agenda: http://leetspeak.se/2013/#schedule
Registration: http://leetspeak.se/2013/#registration

Leetspeak is also one day event, single track, 6 speakers. Thanks to tretton37 and other sponsors, it’s very cheap (200SEK). Tickets are on sale for two days, and most of them are already gone. Be quick, if you want to get there! I really enjoyed my weekend in Malmo last year, and I am anticipating similar this year in Stockholm.

Oredev
When: 4-8 November
Where: Malmo, Sweden
Agenda: http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference
Registration: http://oredev.org/2013/registration

Oredev is Scandinavian classic, one of the biggest and most popular conferences in Europe. It takes place in Malmo in early November. It’s quite pricey, but for the money you get three days packed with multiple tracks with awesome speakers. I’ve never been there and unfortunately won’t be there this year, but I heard mostly good stuff about this conference. If you have opportunity, it’s definitely good event to attend. Tickets are still available.

Build Stuff
When: 9-11 December
Where: Vilnius, Lithuania
Speaker list and registration: http://buildstuff.lt/

Build Stuff is Greg Young’s conference in Vilnius. It started last year as small, single track one day event. This year, it exploded into full blown 3-day Oredev-league conference, still staying within reasonable price range. It looks promising, is not very expensive, and only few hours drive from Poland. You really need a good reason not to go there.

When you choose event, and attend it remember to act accordingly. They’re great social events, from which you can get much more than just knowledge. My friends wrote a spot-on post about it. Just read second part of it.