process

The great conference tour of October 2015

The most interesting presentations I have seen last month.

I have just wrapped up a speaking tour of multiple conferences across 4 countries and two continents.

I started with a trip to Desenzano (near Milan), where I spoke about removing boilerplate code from NodeJS (or any JavaScript code really). The conference was extremely interesting, single track, English language festival of all things Node. I especially liked two presentations by two native Italian speakers:

1: Matteo Figus @matteofigus showed a great working system for the front end for handling separate components. The system called OC is a full featured, open sourced system for building, distributing and serving front-end components.

2: Massimiliano Mantione @M_a_s_s_i showed how to combine Docker with Git-like system of incremental patches for faster deployments while working with code.

The AC was the largest Angular conference in Europe. The entire Google NG team was there. The presentations were awesome, and the caliber of speakers was just incredible. Luckily, every presentation was recorded, the videos are available. I am sure that I was invited only because of a lucky break; maybe people wanted to see the repeat of my primes speech from ng-conf 2015. I tried my best, slides, but this is nothing compared to most presentations at the conference. Here are my favorites

My first full presentation in Russian! It took a while to prepare the slides and practice the delivery; I am much more fluent in English when speaking about my professional field. Still, I think the delivery itself went very well. I was the last speaker, so it was an honor.

My favorite presentation was by Андрей Мясников "Процесс: как наладить, а не нагадить" - literally "The process: how to fix it; not screw it". The slides in Russian. The guys was a great speaker too.

The interesting fact about QAFest - there were 700 attendees, and half of them were women. You know the high tech's gender problem in North America and Western Europe? It was very hard to see a similar problem in Ukraine. Maybe because the other professional avenues usually considered as "female jobs" are payed less well than IT? Maybe if we pay even more in high tech jobs (compared to teaching or nursing for example), the problem would fix itself.

The conference was on Halloween, so lots of people changed to costumes afterwards - there was a big party with live music, best costume competition, games, food and drinks.

Next day after my Ukrainian presentation I travelled to Berlin for CodeMotion. The conference was definitely a very different event from QAFest, but there were two gems. Both were talks about security, both by Italian engineers.

  • Gianluca Varisco @gvarisco has delivered a beast of a presentation: non-stop security exploits across languages, libraries, systems. Very content-packed slides.
  • Andrea Pompili has talked with great passion (and very interestingly) about the economics of hacking and security slides

I spoke about xplain - how we generate the API documentation from our unit tests, removing the need to maintain separate docs. Good short presentation, I also wrote timer-bar while in Berlin to help me stay on time in my HTML presentations.

I finished the tour on my home turf, delivering an hour long presentation on improving one's JavaScript skills. This was the 4th time I delivered some version of the same presentation, based on this blog post.

The Boston Code Camp presentation was special. It was the longest time slot I ever had, allowing me to show more content. I also had a chance to rethink the overall structure, remove some parts and expand others. I also placed all source samples into a companion repo - anyone can grab it and explore the code.

Other highlights:

I am sitting tight for a while, no more speaking gigs until next year!