When I started my career as a software engineer, I didn’t have any map or list of skills that are necessary to succeed. I’ve spent too much time on unimportant stuff, a far too little on crucial things. If you know at least something about software development - you can create web service in Django, or build microservice in Spring, crate some machine learning model, or write Spark Job - and you want to advance your career to the next level, this blog post might be helpful for you.

Before we start, I have good and bad news.
The good news is that at some point you will have to unlearn what you have learned. If you learn something, you are becoming blind to other things that you can learn. Remember, you are a creative person; your mind should be free and open for new waters. Do not be afraid to forget stuff.

The bad news is that you will probably never stop learning.
Over time, some things became similar, and we use similar design patterns in different contexts. Even that something is similar, it is not an excuse to stop learning. You need thousands of hours of practice and writing software to be good at it. Besides spending many years writing software, I know that I have deficiencies in some areas that I want to improve.

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. 

Photo credit