Let IT Bee: CraftConf - Hello, Budapest

Surround yourself with those on the same mission as you

This famous quote has been an important guide for me on my track to self-improvement. Therefore I am searching for IT conferences and communities all over the world where I can meet like-minded souls.

With over 2200 attendees from over 42 countries, the Craft Conf is one of the most popular IT-craft conferences in the world. As one of the grateful invites to the diversity program, I now finally had the chance to be a part of it as well.

This opportunity provided me to meet crafters, share experiences, and hear and learn something new. And to enjoy the culture of Budapest of course!

One of the most interesting things I experienced was a Coding Dojo workshop. Doing #mobprogramming with 10+ other people and having Emily Bache and Llewellyn Falco as facilitators was a great experience about which I will write more in one of the upcoming posts.

Don’t watch these talks

Emily Bache - Technical Leadership and Empowered Teams

In a DevOps world of Agile empowered teams, exerting technical leadership across an organization is challenging. When I was a junior to mid-level developer, the technical leaders in my organization were called Architects. Day to day, I saw little of them. The help they gave me comprised mainly of architectural diagrams to guide development work, and compulsory standard tools and frameworks. Occasionally they would hold workshops with the whole team and go through important technical decisions. These people, although once skilled programmers, did not write code themselves any more.

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Portia Tung - Unleash your play brain

Have you lost your mojo or got bored with life? Are you stuck in a rut and can’t quite figure out how to get out of it? Does work keep getting in the way of your dreams? Have you reached a crossroads and don’t know which way to go?

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Llewellyn Falco - From 0% to Cleanly Refactored 100% tested code

In this guided demo, we are going to look at 3 different techniques that are remarkably powerful in combination to cut through legacy code without having to go through the bother of reading or understanding it.

The techniques are:

Combination Testing: to get 100% test coverage quickly

Code Coverage as guidance: to help us make decisions about inputs and deletion

Provable Refactorings: to help us change code without having to worry about it.

In combination, these 3 techniques can quickly make impossible tasks trivial.

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Michael Nir - Persuading the Bear

It was 9 pm on a Friday and I was at work, my spouse called asking when I’d be home, my boss was all over me. I had been working on a proposal for 5 months and couldn’t get team, vendor and client’s buy in! I became insufferable, even Ron, my best friend, declined our traditional Wednesday beer date. I changed jobs frequently, feeling disengaged (my ‘record’ was 4 hours) until I became physically ill. After a third round of antibiotics, I decided to quit another position and start working for myself

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Martin Fowler and Birgitta Bockeler - Cultivating Architecture

Many organizations today strive to establish autonomous development teams who can move as independently of each other as possible. The goal is to achieve speed and scalability – but what does architecture governance look like in such a decentralised setup? We’ll discuss how to keep everybody aligned on a shared understanding of the architecture and thus avoid prescriptive standardisation without getting chaos

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Nick Tune - Domain-Driven Design: Hidden Lessons from the Big Blue Book

We are entering an incredible new era of digital product development where users expect a seamless experience across all of their touchable, wearable, and voice-activated devices. How can we learn to develop software effectively in this new digital-by-default world? What if the answers are hidden away as secret messages in a 15 year old book? Are bounded contexts really used to design loosely coupled code, or are they one of the most powerful organisation design tools used to enable autonomous, self-organising teams? Are core domains just academic jargon that get in the way of shiny technical practices like event sourcing, or is understanding business core domains one of the key differentiators between high-performing delivery teams and the rest of us? Let’s go on an adventure and see if the big blue big and can help us in this brave new world

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Julie Lerman - Dev and Test Agility for your Database with Docker

Agile practices teach us how to deal with evolving applications but so often the data store is overlooked as a component of your application lifecycle. Database servers are monolothic, resource intensive and mostly viewed as set in stone. Encapsulating your database server in a container and your database in a storage container can dramatically lighten the load and make your database as agile as your model and other processes.

Watch it

You can find other interesting talks from the Craft Conf on their official YouTube Channel.

Wonderful energy, wonderful people, great organization, and sponsors. I definitely recommend to everyone with an IT-related profession to visit this conference. In particular, I would like to appeal to women to make use of the opportunity and apply for a diversity program. Each year around spring time the applications open on the official CraftConf website.

Enjoy the photos from the conference, they are worth a thousand words.