On November 20-21 I had a pleasure to participate in the CodeMotion 2018 conference in Berlin. I’m Szymon, senior software developer with passion for programming. I’ve supposed to attend in to the nice, professional conference. And I had no disappointment in this area. Let me share my impressions which I had there during that two-days event with you.

As I mentioned earlier, whole event was organized in Berlin and lasted two days, so I had to stay overnight and arrange transport. In terms of location, the organizers made sure that the chosen place (KulturBrauerei) was located very conveniently. From metro line U2 to the entrance of the conference there was no more than 300-500m. There was also a tram stop in the area. In the case of accommodation, the capital of Germany does not require a description: everyone can find something for themselves and in a quite convenient location.

In the other areas the organizers also did a great job: there was a fast internet available everywhere, same as distributors with water, free coffee, and a lot of meals for almost every each part of a day. A nice thing was also the polish film crew from Poznań, who ensured recording at a professional level. There was no exaggeration in the “advertising” place for sponsors. The whole thing made an impression of a well-balanced event. And believe me, that is quite hard to achieve on this kind of top-heaviness. To complement the basic information, I will mention that about 800 people participated in the conference. So it was a medium-sized one.

However all of the above are just add-ons. Although they make a difference, but they are not the most important here. The most important factor of each conference is its substantive part and I want to devote it to the rest of the following entry.

The word “substantive” is chosen here deliberately: not all lectures were strictly technical. The main conference paths concerned: Artificial Intelligence, architecture with microservices at the forefront, ethics and inspiration, game-dev, DevOps, Big Data, Inspirations or front-end (JavaScript + UX). I will try to describe a few of the most interesting characters and lectures here, but I encourage you to join the next conference for more 🙂 and to find some of these talks on your own in the internet.

Let me start with the topic opening the conference titled “Building human interfaces powered by AI”. Not only because it was first, but because it was very good. Its author is Christian Heilmann, who has been involved in IT for about 2 decades, currently under the flag of Microsoft. Christian raised a very important topic which is the ethics when creating solutions based on artificial intelligence, how how these solutions shape reality, human behavior, thoughts etc. and what we can do about it. A very interesting talk, I strongly encourage you to find and listen to it too.

Another interesting lecture was Bruce Lawson‘s “Shokunin of the web“. He shared the observation that the future of the Internet is not in Europe or in the US, but in the Asian world, where more people live than in the rest of the globe. As Bruce is a keen advocate of adherence to standards on the web (where I support and encourage readers to do this kind of thing myself), he has called for two things: to respect those mentioned, and also to limit the foofaraw to the necessary minimum. Most people living in the aforementioned circle, if they already have internet, then it’s mostly very slow comparing to these days European standards – so no one will care about your super fancy beautiful 1500-component application on React or other Angular if it will load more than … several seconds. Which is quite a challenge for today’s sites with few MB with only of JavaScript itself.

The last lecture, which I would like to share with you, is “3 common pitfalls in Microservice Integration” by Bernd Ruecker. The speaker very nicely presented some cases of difficult to catch errors in the distributed architecture and prescriptions for solving them. He showed very well the symptoms of these errors. This technically advanced lecture was presented very easily; it would seem that the subject is practically trivial, but in fact everyone could get something out of it – from the novice adepts of distributed applications, up to the old tips of the topic. An extremely valuable lecture.

In addition to the high substantive level of this conference, there is one thing that really appeals to me: plenty, but it’s literally a lot of different regions of the world with many great people who could be met there. This is one of the greatest things that can happen to anyone who aspires to be a professional in any industry: free exchange of ideas, experiences, perceptions or impressions is something that I wish everyone.

I hope we meet there soon!

 

Links in which you may be interested: