Tag: talks

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!

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.

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.