Tag: dotnetconfpl

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 :).

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!