Report on BuildStuffLT 2015

The BuildStuffLT'15 is over and it's time to wrote my impressions about it. Again. Last year I attended this conference for the first time and absolutely loved it. At the end of January I bought an early bird ticket and waited eagerly for it almost whole year.
Last year the organizers of the event gave a present of personalized t-shirt design to everyone. This year there were cartoonists waiting for everyone to take a seat in front of them. On the third day their outcome was a long wall of portraits of attendees. If your brain started melting, you could switch from listening to various topics to doing something more fun - playing an escape type game with oculus rift, riding a one wheel, test your skills in typing or gather a team for a space flight game and win a raspberry pi(which I did!), watch the magician perform the tricks on others or you, write an algorithm to optimize stocks buying/selling strategy - getting involved in each of the activity - made you eligible to compete for various and quite serious prizes. Of course, at any time there was plenty of pop corn, coffee, apples. Anywhere you could meet and talk to the famous(and not so) speakers, ask them questions. Yes, they are rock stars of our trade, but they don't behave like ones hiding in a VIP lounge. The organizers really try hard to make us feel really comfortable - like at home - buy providing us with slippers. And on the third day I did enjoy them so much.
Topics varied from testing to thorough guide on aeronautics history, but the top ones were about functional programming, micro services and Docker. Physically it's impossible to attend them all, as there are five announcements in parallel. But you can watch them later online.
So what are these rock stars that blessed us with their knowledge? To name a few, Uncle Bob Martin, Michael Feathers, Venkat Subramian, Oren Eini(aka Ayende), with Kelvin Henney, Mark Rendle, Dylan Beattie giving both valuable and entertaining announcements as always.
Truth is that 90 percent of our tasks at work are very mundane and similar, and we rarely get to feel like hackers, ninjas and knights there. This conference made us feel like ones, breath in the fresh air of new, complicated stuff. It made us feel important and special. And finally it inspired us - to not forget who we are, to learn new stuff, apply it and simply be better programmers.