2016-11-16

BuildStuffLT again...

So... today is a first day of BuildStufLT 2016 conference for developers that actually build stuff. For me it's a third time in a row. Don't get too jealous,  because last year I went on my own expense.
Whenever I get asked for how many days I'm staying there and give an answer of "3 days" I get the high eyebrows... It's true that the best experience seems to be when you go there for first time, but it doesn't mean that other times are worse - the conference is changing every year and everyone becomes more picky once they have a baseline for comparison. No, first time is not the best. Everyone just tends to idealize it like a first love.
So, what's different this year?
Believe it or not, none of the companies having their lounge space-mini headquarters dasn't brought a single fuss-ball table!!! There are no table tennis,  no darts (probably there never were ones ever). The space itself is themed as a DOS operating system. And there is an old gaming console space containing really old stuff... After opening speech (which had Vilnius mayor as a guest) we got showered in a rain of balloons. This year  everyone can ask questions through sli.do application, and the questions are visible on smaller of screens, one can vote/like them and the questions get answered at the end of the session. There are even two coffee desks this year(there was one last year), at least two bank companies presenting themselves (a big improvement after the last year's one). One can play treasure hunt by scanning QR codes of certain company employee cards'. It's just the day one, and I believe that many tricks will be revealed tomorrow.
But it's not the tricks and games that everyone is coming there for. The speakers, the networking matter much more. But with 5 simultaneous tracks it's impossible to attend them all(good news is that later the recordings of the sessions will be available online) and to choose the best ones based on a short description. So, I will mention only those that stood out the most and the ones I attended.
The opening keynote speech was given by Greg Young himself about long sad story of micro-services which according to him always have been there but only under a different name. So, we are reinventing the wheel every time.
Paul Stack talked about centralized logging without the blood, sweat and tears and bragged about his architectural solution which helped reduce the expenses on infrastructure from $25.000 to ~$140 per month. And he achieved all this by using AWS Lambda, Kinesis and Elasticsearch.
I was impressed by Hadi Hariri's capability to explain the main features(and how to use it for DSLs) of Kotlin(a new statically typed language) in a clear and concise manner. I even got inspired to try it out myself. That's no surprise at all, because I like trying out new things, but some presentations can make you refrain from trying the stuff out...
Next followed Alberto Brandolini's session on a serious issue of learning. A serious issue targeted with funny jokes and pink goggles. According to him, our brain is wired so, that we end up learning anyway - so, if the work we do is boring, we end up learning other stuff. And according to him, nobody should feel bad about that. He cited many quotes of Dan North and I thought "I should look him up online later".
What I should have done instead is looked at the session schedule more carefully - as the closing keynote of the day was given by the Dan North himself. What he did talk about was the important topic of decision making. Of course, the scope of decisions was narrowed down to IT dilemmas(a big disappointment that expected some insights of complicated human's life): automated vs. manual build, automated vs. manual tests, test-driven vs. test-after vs. test-first, spike vs. stabilize, monoliths vs. components, objects vs. functions, synchronous vs. asynchronous, threads vs. event loop vs. actors vs. CSP(yes, these all are concurrency models), dry vs. decoupled and many others existential questions in developer's life. And to no surprise, the answer which one of those to choose according to Dan North is "it depends". However according to him one shouldn't default to this answer when tackling such situations: Scala vs. Java or spaces vs. tabs. But in general, every decision is a trade off. And when you know what you are trading off, you can make an informed decision.

No, the conference is not worse this year. It's a different one indeed, but what matter the most to me is whether I hear my problems addressed from the stage and get inspired by those speakers. It's a fifth anniversary of a conference this year. In the opening keynote Greg Young challenged us to try imagining a birthday cake for 800 people... So, Greg, how big it will be?

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