Last week in my „conference season” was unique
I am not speaking at any of the conferences. And as I said in a post some time ago I am switching my blog profile to address quality from more wholesome position then just testing and testers. That’s why I went for both conferences Wroc# and BoilingFrogs
Today we will cover Wroc# and Tomorrow BoilingFrogs
Wroc#
Disclaimer Company I work for – Objectivity is the organiser of this conference, and I got a ticket as part of the pool for employees.
What is Wroc#?
In short, a conference dedicated to .Net Specialist. Wroc# is one track Conference, with big stage mimicking one that you can find on one of the biggest conferences. And never before I have seen limitations of one track conference more than here. You have 500 audience different people with different need with one thing in common – they work in the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s hard to cater to the needs of such a diverse group with only 6 presentations.
I am sure everybody has found at least one presentation that was for him but Looking at the amount of discussion happening at the back I a lot of people had a problem with finding keeping interested in the whole event.
So do I have any suggestion?
I think having some space for discussion panels or Open space for UnConfrence would improve the event significantly.
But let’s get back on topic.
The Event attractions
Each Conference event has some gimmick to make it special.
Wroc# was no different.
I think the thing that surprised me the most, was, the second part of the floor initially hidden behind the curtain was a makeshift canteen with hot-dogs!
But this also had a lousy side when people were bored with presentations they were going there to talk, and well if you were sitting in last few rows you could hear them.
Objectivity Also brought each StairClimbChallenge – basicly you could report how many floors you climbed – each one translated into 25 groszy for a charity.
Last but not least, the twitter wall – I’ve seen it on a few conferences already, but this one was most impressive.
Let’s talk about presentations.
I won’t discuss all the presentations in great detail, but I will mention what was most valuable for me.
Alexey Zimarev – DDD, Event Sourcing and Actors
The most memorable performance for me was the most broken one
Alexey had an ambitious plan, do a proper show with drawing slides on iPad as he goes and wrting code live.
But he didn’t have plan B, and as you can imagine a lot went wrong, making the presentation a fantastic train wreck. I was fascinated, and I couldn’t stop watching.
But even with this all issues, I am content, I have theoretical knowledge of all DDD, Event sourcing and Actors, and I have seen them used in some practical sense together, which helped me to sort my thoughts on the subject.
Alexy is Currently writing a book about DDD I am thinking about checking it out.
Vidar Kongsli Continuous Delivery with Azure Web Apps
One thing that made me respect Vidar is he was typing a lot of code and commands and didn’t make a single typo. After his presentation, I asked him how he did that. He said that practising in the home he made every possible mistake just so he knew how to recover from them, but thanks to it he was very fluent in what he was doing.
As for presentation itself, it was a short, concise tutorial on how to do continuous delivery with Azure Web APs. Vidar explained three approaches that can be used and showed how to do them. If you plan to use, Azure Web Apps find video from the presentation and watch it. It will give you all the information you need for a start.
Shahid Iqbal Kubernetes
I was looking for this presentation the whole day, I have no experience with Kubernetes, and I wanted to know more about it.
I have one word Shahid delivered; he explained what strong sides of Kubernetes are.
He also made it clear that not everybody needs it, which is very important.
Another thing he presented was a little sad new about alternative tools he said Kubernetes ate them all.
But he did something more, going with the motto „give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
He finishes with sharing with the audience this page Katacoda.
a compelling resource to train in using Kubernetes and a lot of other tools.
With this, I will finish my relation,
It was an exciting experience. I have met a lot of people I haven’t seen in years (some at least 8!)
Tomorrow report from boiling frogs. For now, if you want to read my other relations, you can check it here.