Tag: conferences

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.

Craft Conference in Budapest

Last week I’ve been to Budapest to attend Craft Conference. This was first edition, but they started big. One workshop day, two day of talks. 3 tracks, around 25 speakers (just look at the lineup – it’s awesome), few hundred attendees. All that in beautiful Budapest. On the paper it all looks great

In reality… well, it was OK but not great. Many tracks were very low quality. Either not very skilled speakers, or speakers I know they could better, but seems like they didn’t care. Slots for talks were pretty short (around 40 minutes), and this could have ruined few talks – especially that speakers learned about it on place. Also organizers didn’t keep the time very rigorously, what caused that breaks between rooms didn’t sync. You often missed beginning of talk in another room, because previous one in the other ran longer. But the worst thing ever was the sponsors pitch for the beginning. Total mood killer.

But this sounds too harsh, because overall I had awesome time. Organizers managed to gather great crowd of attenddees. We also had big contingent from Poland. Some people I knew very well, other just from twitter and met them IRL for ther first time. It was nice just to hangout around venue, which BTW was very cool. Modern construction from steel and glass componed into some older building. Many places to charge your electronics and WiFi that worked for the most time. Really good choice.

As we talked with friends afterwards – we don’t go to conferences for the talks. That’s why we all very much enjoyed Craft Conference. Will definitely try to put it on my calendar next year.

There were few talks I liked, especially : Evan Czaplicki’s, Greg Youngs’s, Gojko Adzic’s and Stefan Tilkov’s. I also heard that Dan North’s keynote was great too. Thanks to one of the organizers all of them were streamed lived and most of them are available to watch.

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.

Øredev and NDC

Three weeks ago I was at Øredev conference in Sweden and had a great time there. I just wanted to share few thoughts about it. I won’t dive into specific talks, as there were simply too many. Just my general impression – what I liked, and what in my opinion didn’t work.

Øredev is well established, big, Scandinavian software conference. It’s held in Malmö, Sweden and this year the venue was Slagthuset – old butcher house. Really liked that place. Nice looking, spacy, wheelchair friendly.

Speaker list was long, but it kinda lacked big names. There were some rock stars, but not as many, as compared to similar in size NDC. Also level of
talks varied – some of them were awesome, but also there were some that just sucked. I liked (and wrote about already) that my new toy – F# (and
functional programming in general) were so well represented.

Usually during conferences you meet lot of great people, and Øredev was no different. I was told by people, who attended previous edition, that creating great environment for sharing knowledge has always been very important for organizers. And also – we had quite large Polish Crew, which made whole event even funnier.

Øredev usually has some theme, and this year this was “arts”. It had potential, but I think it was pulled too far. Some talks felt forcefully “artified” to match it. Also keynotes were more focused on arts, than software, which made them also “weird” and in my opinion mostly unsuccessful. I don’t think software conference realy need theme, especially if it come out so unnaturally.

I also had a chance to attend NDC earlier this year, and it’s hard not to compare those conferences. They’are similar in size, both held in Scandinavian cities with big software communities. Speaker list looked more impressive and talks were on higher level in general. NDC also had area, where you could watch talks when you were undecided. 8 screens (one for each track), you just grabbed headset, and you could switch between sessions. Now, this is slightly controversial – because you don’t get direct contact with speakers. But when you were tired and really undecided, this was good place to just take nap or switch between session to pick one. What I also liked about NDC is that there where no designated lunch times. Food was there all the time – continous delivery ;).

NDC forked this year, and there will be another instance in London. I won’t be there, but maybe you should try?

On the final note, I have subjective feeling, that I had much more fun during Oredev. In this place, I would really like to thank Emily Holweck, who made this trip possible. She convinced me to come, and helped me overcome all medical obstacles I had. She’s very committed to making Øredev great, and I believe this also impacted why I had so much fun there. Because at the end of the day it’s all about people.

Lots of love for F# during Øredev

Last week I had tons of fun (and learning!) at Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. My full writeup is still yet to come, but as videos are popping up, I’d like to show you how well F# and functional programming in general were represented during conference. On second day, you could do a streak of 3 F# talks one after another!

This are links to talk pages, where you can find video (or in some cases not – hope it will pop up soon), grouped by presenters, sorted randomly. Let’s start with F# focused links:

And off to less F#, but still interesting functional talks:

Bodil also gave talk on implementing your own lisp (in Clojure, of course) at nearby Foo Cafe. This was pretty hardcore, and I didn’t get much from it. But it was recorded, so smarter people will probably make use of that.

As you can see, lots of functional love. As always you could always hang out with speakers between/after sessions and ask them (in my case) some lame questions or see them hacking around. Great fun, and good opportunity to learn new stuff.

Progressive F# Tutorials in London

Yesterday I went for a crazy trip to London. At least most people would call that, because for me it was perfect. It had all I like – flying planes, meeting great people and learning new stuff. I woke up at 3 to catch 6 AM flight to London. Then take a train to center, took part in Prog F# Tutorials and then went back to airport to get on 8 PM flight. I was back home around midnight.

Prog F# Tutorials are two day F# conference organized by Skills Matter. In agenda you could find almost all the rock-stars of F# world – Don Syme, Phillip Trelford, Richard Minerich, Rachel Reese, Robert Pickering, Jon Harrop and Simon Cousins.  Unfortunately, I could only attend first day due to medical procedure planned for today, but one day is always better then none.

First talk by Jon Harrop was about adopting F# by large insurance company. He talked about what are best ways to convince people to start using F#, what worked, and what didn’t. I would like this session to be more technical, but there were still few interesting points he mentioned. After that, public split into two rooms. In main one, Rich was live coding (with help of audience) to solve Bank OCR Kata. It was entertaining, and quite interesting to see how someone puts his F# knowledge to solve problems. The other group were solving F# Koans with Rachel Reese. After lunch went to Rachel’s workshop “From Zero to Data Science”. Based on tutorials, you can find on tryfsharp.org, we were “learning by solving” some extra tasks Rachel prepared for us. For beginner like me, some of them were really challenging. Another difficulty proved to be tryfsharp.org’s capacity. Around 100 people trying stuff out there killed the server and it started throwing 503s. Anyway, this was my favorite session of the whole day. In second room Robert Pickering was doing his Undertone session. And to wrap up, Phillip did quick talk about using F# in finance. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see Don Syme’s talk planned for the morning. He got stuck in Germany and didn’t get on time. Bummer, cause I anticipated this one the most.

The whole thing took place in the crypt below old church (this was Halloween! :)). This is so great place to host conference, so different than standard grey rooms. The only problem was, that it was not really wheelchair accessible. But Theo and his Skills Matter crew helped me get there. From logistics point of view everything went pretty great. There were constantly resupplied snacks and coffee, tasty lunch and beer for the end. Wifi worked with some issues, but it hold pretty well, considering over 100 people doing queries against tryfsharp.org.

To sum up – this was a good day. I am okay to travel halfway through Europe to get to events like that. I only wish I could also be there on second day, but maybe next year. I am really happy, that I met in person and talked to some F# pros, whom before that day I only followed on twitter. And Skills matter crew are awesome, and I definitely will look to attend their events in future.

BTW, if you are based in London are into F#, check out this meetup group.

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!