Motivation to this post

Software developer skill set should not be limited to hard programming skills. Also, important for of our work is communication, problem understanding, self-sufficiency and other soft skills.

It this blog post, I would like to show the positive aspects for software developer who participated in agile like conference. You will also find here a lot of information about Stretch Con, on which my experience is based on.

As a conclusion, I’ll present what outcome Stretch conference had on me.

Why I wanted to go?

There are many Agile/Lean/Leadership conferences, Thus, you do not have to choose Stretch. Look around for upcoming events, meetups or trainings. There is always something going on. But in this post I’ll only focus on Stretch.

On my regular basis I am software developer and at least half time of my job I spend on programming. My contribution in a company is not strictly related to any management role.

I wanted to go to Stretch Con, because I’ve belived that:

• Everyone is a leader of himself/herself. You have to manage your time efficiently.
• I can learn technical things by myself (by studying them). I did not know how to develop my soft skills – or at least I did not know how to start.
• Understanding processes, dependencies and co-workers’ and clients’ motivations are crucial and they improve the quality of produced software.
• You can not connect dots looking forward.

Stretch Con 15

Stretch was different, unlike any other conference I have attended, mainly because of the topic but also because of the fact that it forced me to think and interact.

Open spaces

Open spaces were great. Topics were shaped dynamically (voted via sli.do). It was a place where you could directly see, that other people, from different companies (different countries) have the same problems!

Regular form of open space

Those open spaces had a form of brainstorming ideas, where everyone throws an possible solution to the problem. It gave us the possibility to share and discuss ideas.

Joseph discussion panel

During the open space time, something unexpected happened. Discussion panel with Joseph Pelrine emerged. It started naturally, and eventually a lot of people accumulated around him. Gathered people asked Joseph questions, a he responded with deep explanation. Discussion was about:

• transparency,
• environment,
• estimation,
• product owner,
• estimation,
• ErlangC model.

And many more topics, but I was not able note everything. For such moments, it was worth going there.

Conference talks

In my opinion, on average every second talk was worth watching. I think it is a good score for single track conference. Listening to ‘leaders’, was priceless. Wide variety of subjects, helped me realize that this topic is huge.

Best talks

As usual, I would like to recommend 3 presentations which are worth seeing, but there are many more that migh interest you. Visit Ustream channel to watch them.

James Clear: The Surprising Power of Small Habits

After a great introduction, James presented detailed knowledge about the habits. He showed us techniques for shaping habits. Explained habit triggers. Finally, he also presented tricks how to sustain our habits.
You can read more about habits at James Clear Page.

Conference video available here.

Tim Steigert: Don’t blame the goats. Get a Goatherd

It was a presentation, that forced reflection about me. It helped me tu understand who is a leader, what is the team or company and how all of it this fits into our world. Most importantly, how to ‘get’ a goatherd.

Conference video available here.

Joseph Pelrine: Coaching “self-organizing” teams

Joseph started his lecture with explanation of Complex systems. Then, he started discussing social self organization. Among many concepts that he presented, one particularly stuck in my mind. You have to setup for good thing to hapen naturally. Then you have to monitor them, and decide what to do more and what to stop. If you want to know how to setup things, you have to watch video.

Conference video available here.

Conference itself

I’ll remember this event as something positive. Here is my summary.

Pros:

• Scene decoration was consistent with name of the conference. You may think it is not important, but it really helped me a lot, to put my brain into good mood.
• Content of the gift bag, including book “This is Lean“. For the first time I’ve received the book, instead of a useless gadget in gift bag. Great idea!
• Great venue localization. Venue itself was impressive, too.
• Selected conference speakers including book authors, people who change things (e.g. John Bunch - Holacracy guru at Zappos). I’ve had a feeling that Conference program committee, made many hard decisions.

Cons:

• Everyone were talking in Hungarian. It was so hard to start a discussion during breaks.

Outcome

I’ve made 464 lines of notes, from the whole conference. There were also official notes, in case I missed something. Great concept and great drawing.

I was there with Wojtek. After the conference we have spend 3 hours talking and discussing Stretch content. We’ve managed only to discuss only about few talks - there were a lot of material presented there.

On my way home, I’ve written down few action points, reflections about myself, that I will try to develop in the upcoming weeks.

• Consciously shape your habits.
• Turn the camera to yourself, see your actions and behaviors.
• Stretch your horizon, to look for new opportunities and possibilities. It will help you with problem solving.
• Do I really watch carefully?
• Try not only to hear, but carefully listen to your peers.
• Find better ways to communicate.
• Discover Holocracy and decentralized way of running organizations.
• Engagement, purpose, trust are more important than you think.
• People mindset exists.
• Research more about Complex systems.

In conclusion, I highly recommend attending this kind of event from time to time to every software developer. Surely, you will come out as a different person.

Jitter workshop event is a part of Mobile Central Europe Conference. It is a one day event full of attractions. Each workshop is repeated, so you can attend to two different workshops.

So why, you should attend Jitter?

• You can meet cutting edge technology like Emberlight or Wunderbar.

• You can co operate with you new friends to do amazing stuff.

I have an opportunity to take part in “Cardboard Design” workshop, where mentors where Wiesław and his friends. 

We were working in groups. Our goal was to visualise music using arduino, few servomotors and of course cardboards. We totally unleashed our imagination. Effects was amazing. We have used 100% of our creativity.

Besides that, event took place in a film studio. Raw and unpolished style. It give me more energy to work. But, there was a few defects. It was loud and cold, but organisers do everything to minimize those effects.

I am definitely looking forward for next Jitter on next year MCE

We did it. We did the first Devoxx4Kids Poland. For the last half year we worked very hard to prepare and organise this event. 

I would like to introduce co-organisers of this conference, Tomek Kucharski, Dariusz Kaczyński, Ewa Waliczek. Big thanks to them. I would like to thank Konrad Hoszowski and Eliza Kruczkowska for help. Also this event could not be possible without school and computer administrators from schools. Thank you! Big thanks have to go to Robomaniacs and Robocamp for preparing workshops. And of course this event could not be possible without our sponsors. 

We also receive help from 20 volunteers and two professional photographers. Thank you!

We did eight parallel tracks for kids from 6 to 14 years old. They were four age groups. Each group have different T-shirt colour.  There was a huge variety of topics. There were workshops related to hardware, software and mixed. We used Lego, Arduino and also games like minecraft. Visit devoxx4kids.pl for more informations.

Do you want to organise this kind of event in your city? Email me, I

would like to help you to start this kind of event in your city. Do you want to help in next year edition and join steering committee ? Email me.

This year 33rd Degree conference is over. I’m glad I could help Grzesiek in the organization as a volunteer. It was a good experience and great opportunity to meet new people. 

For me the biggest advantage of this conference are talks. There were many rock star speakers with cutting edge topics. I would like especialy say thank you to Tomek Nurkiewicz. His talk was about Saiku. 

Tomek charisma, teaching skills, good preparation and selection of material is at the highest possible level. Thus that, after one hour I felt like an expert of Saiku and OLAP. 

Thank you and see you next year.

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I’ve spent the last three days on GeeCon 2014. I must say I become demanding when I go to conference, so my opinion is becoming more critical.

Basically the conference was good. There was small problems with WiFi, venue wasn’t in the city center (imagine 1000 peoples ordering taxi or getting to the local bus), but generally it was ok. Most of the talks were good. There is one thing, that I am really happy about. I made a lot of new connections. This is the aspect that push me to the next edition of GeeCON :)

I really enjoyed the afterparty at ‚Stara Zajezdnia’. This place is a local brewery, so we drunk very good beer. Also we had opportunity to take a tour with experienced brewer, so I also learned new things about brewery. Thus GeeCoin game, I also meet new people ;p

There was not any feedback system, so this is my feedback. Lets make an talk about hobbies or very light topics which will take 30 minutes after the dinner. I would like to listen about how take care of you health when working all days with computer, how to make a beer, something about motorization or photography. I need a longer break after the diner with soft topic.

I’ve selected talks, that I think was good and which I would recommend for my friends (excluding keynotes):

• All Sam Newman talks about microservices. Just must watch or read a book.
• Josh Long talk about Spring, because live demo was exploding with energy.
• Tom Bujok with ’33 things you want to do better’, but only the first part. Second part was to obvious for java developer with some experience.
• Kevlin Henney with ‚Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Java Programmers’ for great preparation of content.

Thats it. See you next year.

There was a ticket to CraftConf to win on WJUG raffle. Maciek Górski win this ticket, but he couldn’t go, so he gave the ticket to me :) I was so happy to go to this conference. 

This was three days conference, one day of workshop, two days of university. The ticket I won was for university. At the moment there wasn’t any space left to register on workshop that I was interested in, so I wasn’t present at the workshop.

The day before the conference, there was five meetups:

• Budapest Agile Meetup Group.
• Budapest Database And Big Data Meetup.
• Budapest DevOps Meetup.
• PHP Meetup Budapest.
• Frontend Meetup Budapest + UX Budapest.

The speakers on those meetups were conference speakers. They must have very good communication between those groups and conference organisers, to organise those events :)

My meet up was in ‘Prezi house of ideas’. Prezi is a company started in Budapest. They have great auditorium, for about 200 geeks, where you have place to eat pizza, drink bear all the time, beamer is ready to use and speakers just work. Lets look at the photo:

I feel confused when I entered venue. There wasn’t any tips (arrows) on how to reach the registration desk. Next was the conference room that haven’t been signed. So on web page and on badges, there was order: MainRoom, Room1, Room2. In the venue there was three floors, so many people made an assumption that floor 1 is a MainRoom, floor 2 was room1, floor 3 was room3. It was wrong assumption because MainRoom was floor 2. After first session, arrows appeared on the wall’s. For me, it was only one thing that was bad on this conference. 

Let investigate conference bag. 
I have found, three good gadgets in conference bag:

• Headphones from e-pam. All conference session’s were transmitted online. If I wanted to switch the rooms, I used my computer and headphones to make a sneak peak preview of the other presentations and decide where to go. It was so great ! I did it only twice, because presentations was generally awesome. 
• Phone cover from yahoo. It was raining all the time in Budapest, so this thing was great, because you could use your phone on the rain.
• Sugru from Google.

 

So how about main room? 5 big screens. One for slides, two for camera, two for twitter. Makes an impression. 

For questions to the speech we used sli.do. Whole event was led by one person, who did it great. I remember following sponsors talk Ericcson, Misys, Yahoo, T-Mobile, JetBrains, Epam and maybe more, but I fall asleep. One more fact. 20% of the speakers was woman. Great achievement.

I make about 500 lines of notes. I think I never noted more before. I probably never ever read them again, but this help me remembering things. 

I can distinguish three kinds of topics that was on conference. 

• First are about motivation, passion, craftsmanship. Those kind of of lectures makes you to think about why you do.

• Second group of talks were about architecture or similar things. Those kind of of lectures makes you to think about how you do. 

• Third group of talks where about specified technique or technology. Those kind of of lectures makes you to think about, what you do.

Talks are becoming available at: uStream. If somebody ask me to pick three best lectures (except keynotes) I will point at:

• Jackstones: the journey to mastery - Dan North (Dan North & Associates)
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Flexible Scope - Gojko Adzic (Neuri Consulting LLP)
• Functional Reactive Programming in Elm and JS - Evan Czaplicki (Prezi)

You may ask, why those three? First two are simply great in every word. The third is about passionate speaker. Im do not like front-end and things like that. But Evan, when he presented Elm language, there was a message “I believe in what I am doing” and it was great.

How about networking ? I met geeks from Finland, Germany and even from Australia. After parties helps with this a lot :) 

To summarize. Why to go to CraftConf 2015? Because this conference is a good therapy session. 

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Agile By Example is over. It was good three days. Organizers do they’s best. There was great organization, good internet acces and good food. Jeff Suterland keynote was average. For me the real keynote was given by Sandro Moncuso “Software craftsmanship”.

In the second day, good speach gave Jurgen Appelo and Tom Gilb. Tom Gilb presentation was challenging. Slides were awful. Tom marked many times that we must deliver value. Remember that value may be delivered without single line of code. One of the tools that Tim presented was “Value Decision Tables” which may look as sophisticated Excel system. But Krzysztof Jelski, on the next day presented “Impact Mapping” tool which was very easy to use.

I’ve meet Agile from a new perspective. It was good for me that I’ve joined this conference.

Thank you SoftwareMill and Touk for this event.

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On July 10, there was an event called “Scalania“. A group of Scala developers and Scala “wannabe” developers, meet at Warsaw University Of Technology. We were solving 99-scala problems. Result of our work can be found at bitbucket.

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Dnia 22 lutego, odbył się hackaton o nazwie NameCollision. Impreza zaczęła się punktualnie. FlashTalki dobrze nastawiły ludzi, do zrobienia czegoś fajnego.

Jest trochę po 19. W tym momencie mój film się urywa, gdyż z nowo poznaną osobą przystąpiliśmy do realizacji naszego projektu. Atmosfera ludzi kodujących coś w około powodowała, że jeszcze bardziej skupiałem się na tym co chcieliśmy osiągnąć.
Przegapiłem ciepły posiłek, posiliłem się tylko kilkoma kanapkami. Udało się wykonać to co z kolegą sobie założyliśmy, że zrobimy.
Dochodzi północ, moje bezpieczniki wysiadły, po całym dniu wstawania o 6 rano i chodzenia spać około 11, padłem. Jedyne o czym myślałem to sen.
Miłą niespodzianką na koniec były nagrody dla osób twardo kodujących :)

Po powrocie do domu około 3 w nocy, mój organizm powiedział, że ty już nie musisz spać i możesz kodować dalej ;p
Chciałbym podziękować organizatorom i sponsorom za tak świetnie przygotowany wieczór. Było ekstra. Więcej takich wydarzeń !
PS. Internet był niesamowity. 100Mbitów symetrycznego łącza, które działało bez zarzutu. Brawo dla organizatorów :)

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