Everyone was confused by the upturned keyboard, on which the Senior typed, but it was he who just got out of the laptop screen and pulled his hands to the viewer. In any case, he was cool and greeted guests at the entrance.
Nizhny Novgorod - IT Center
I have been living in Nizhny Novgorod all my life, 10 years of which I have been working in IT and I can say with confidence: Nizhny Novgorod by 2019 has become a real IT cluster. In our city there are IT companies at any educational level, professional profile and career request: Intel, NetCracker, EPAM, MERA, Garda Technologies, IFI Soft, Yandex, HARMAN, Luxoft, Lad, Artezio, Five9, HUAWEI IT, enterprise software developers and so on. Many developers work remotely on large Russian and international projects such as SAP, Itseez, etc., or are part of the technical departments of factories, design institutes, and engineering companies. In total, in the Nizhny Novgorod region there are about 40 thousand IT specialists and more than 900 IT companies of various levels. Such a number of IT specialists requires events, events, festivals - their own, not only taking place in other cities. That is why the companies themselves are actively working in our city, there is an it52 community, iCluster is working - the international IT cluster of the Nizhny Novgorod region, which was the organizer of iFest.
This antique statue is usually in its ancient form and misses IT meetings. This time, antiquity moved to the 21st century and greeted guests at the information desk in a dashing Mexican outfit - nevertheless, iFest passed under the slogan “256 shades of senior”. Oh, how I liked these subtle messages in the interior and visualizations!
And now iFest is interesting, smart, different
So, 2000 people gathered on three floors of the technopark. They were greeted by a vigorous and stylish performance of groups, pleased kawaii girls and invigorated coffee with many tasty things. Between the participants walked imitations of transformers - in fact, life-size puppets for photosets. It was all cute, cute, quite festive and even corresponded to the announced cosplay contest. But is this the most important? Of course not - the entourage of any festival and any conference does not cost absolutely anything, if inside there are boring unnecessary reports, and company stands are sad sadness. Therefore, I quickly left the imitation zone and went for reports. And it was really cool - I even had to pinch myself to make sure that most of the participants paid exactly 0 rubles for participation in the festival, and not 10-20-40 thousand rubles, as it happens.
Anton Shchegutov is one of the organizers of iFest, who found, in fact, a way to get me to the industrial park on October Saturday. Anton, promised hello from Habr - I transmit!
Cosplay was normal, but I won’t write about him :-) Nice.
Reports
There were 32 reports in total, including 2 workshops - it was possible to select “your” reports, read about the speakers and see which room you need to go to in the mobile application. By the way, the application was convenient and functional - I would even say it was hyperfunctional, it had meetings, quests, news, chats, and a list of participants. But the mobile program was the most important point.
It was impossible to visit all the reports, I decided to choose different categories and specific speakers, from whom I expected something cool (expectations were met). I will not retell everything, I note especially cool.
Time
So, the first report that I heard at iFest was the report of Vadim Bezruchko from the IFI Soft company “Experience in infrastructure development: the evolution of BigData”. Once upon a time I was a testing engineer at MFI Soft, and then BigData was just in its infancy, and the last test faxes were squealing in our offices, but it was already clear that it was telecom and security in telecom that were the first areas that would not just talk about bigdate, but they will also use advanced solutions in production. Vadim spoke about evolution, about how the company moved to a new stack of solutions for managing huge data. Vadim told what was the path from Oracle (since 2007) to the current technology stack. The new requirements of the company are: a single cluster, rejection of PL / Sql, scalability, increased fault tolerance. Cassandra, ClickHouse (the name of which, by the way, sounded from all corners of the conference) and many other utilities came to the rescue.
Two
If the program of the event includes Alexander Serbul AlexSerbul from 1C-Bitrix, everyone and especially those who are afraid of technical reports should go for it. Three reasons:
- the report is always just about very complex
- awesome, fiery presentation and lively contact with the audience
- you can just learn to keep yourself in front of the audience and establish contact with it.
Alexander's slides as a separate element of the intellectual stand-up
This time, Alexander told why the AI manager and how the manager should be with these huge amounts of information, work with statistics, and why the manager does not need to be a mathematician. The speaker’s messages concerned project managers who should not go into technical jungle, but should create, coordinate, put together a team that can work on data. According to Alexander, it all starts with a culture of collecting, cleaning and storing data, and a successful AI / ML project must have certain ingredients. Against the background of the Docker-Docker-Docker that surrounds me, I liked the words that "Docker is an echo of the sexual revolution, study Unix as a whole."
Three
More and more people buy clothes online and more and more messages appear that the clothes did not fit and it's time to sell them on one of the sites. Virtual fitting rooms, if any, look pretty stupid. And to be honest, I didn’t think that there was anything to be done about it except to go to an offline store. Now imagine: several people in different styles of clothes go into the room, move, sit on a chair, stand in an embrace - and the neural network says: Vasya has shorts and a T-shirt, Masha has a dress, Kostya has trousers and sneakers. Even without being a designer and owner of a fashion store, you understand what this opens up prospects.
It was about this technology (with a demonstration) that Maxim Kazakov from Huawei spoke in his report “Fashion AI (Deep Learning Methods for Solving Problems in the Fashion Industry).
Guys made the model cooler than what was offered by the market
Four
I could not miss this report as a regular Habr - at least in order to look at Luka Safonov live LukaSafonov . So, before telling about the report, I will tell you this: go and read Luke's posts on Habré - there are many of them and this is information security with a human face.
Luke made a presentation on the “ICS Safety Audit” report, and the whole report was cold sweat on his back. Spekr easily and with good humor talked about security holes in industrial companies, elementary bruteforce, pentests, and with all the enjoyment of the report, it was very scary that somewhere in our city, region, country, there may be an enterprise with such security policies (none).
The tablets of security from Luke Safonov
Some information from the report.
- Toolkit for security analysis of ICS (I think, not only them): Wireshark, Plcscan, Modscan, modbusdetect, WinCC Harvester, Binwalk, Nmap / masscan, Burp Suite.
- Typical vulnerabilities: vulnerabilities in software, unused software, simple passwords, default passwords, lack of basic security settings, gaps in the perimeter of the ICS, lack of access control, “weak” security mechanisms in the ICS.
- Where to identify vulnerabilities: components of the technological segment, components of dispatch systems, network infrastructure, OS components, controllers.
Five
Among the cool presentations was a speech by Alexei Levanov from Sberbank PJSC "Gamification as a way to expand the hiring funnel." I would call it ideal in every sense: presentation, content, viable and portable idea, speaker's charisma.
I don’t specially retell the reports in their entirety - presentations from all reports will appear within a week and I will supplement this post with links to them, so keep them in your bookmarks.
All materials are here! Presentations in the Speakers section.
Company stands
The stands of almost all companies this time were alive - so much so that it was very difficult to go up and take pictures of them, not like talking to employees: on three stands, visitors tried virtual reality glasses on their skin, and for many it was not easy. Looking at a guy who completely lost his coordination and fell back, I thought that the future is here, but sometimes has nothing to do with our body: put on glasses and that's it, a strong guy is helplessly lost in another area, the brain refuses to recognize the floor underfoot and the situation around. And on the other hand (in every sense) the children cheerfully had fun with Lego robots, confidently sorting out spare parts and boldly striding towards the assembled robots. It is likely that VR-glasses for them will not be a reason to lose themselves in space, this is another generation, now it is difficult to imagine what it will be and what their iFest will be in 2030.
The younger generation is running out - it was felt especially brightly at the festival: in addition to jokes, there were many children aged 16-18
No AR / VR will knock them down! This is their atmosphere and our future.
I want to highlight a few stands
The stand of HARMAN , the iFest general partner, began at the entrance to the technopark: in front of the building was all such a connected car BMW X3. But the main movement was at the stand, where you could learn about the company's developments, play, test, actually touch artificial intelligence with your hands. By the way, Harman has vacancies - I looked for them for you.
Car simulator, neural networks and total interest of visitors
Top view of the Harman stand, on the right - a car simulator, to which it was impossible to break through!
Opposite Harman was the stand of Matler , a company that develops industrial solutions based on artificial intelligence and neural networks. A simple stand with a demonstration of the safety control capabilities of industrial workers could hardly attract me - how many of them I saw, not counted. But this is the case when people decided. The two girls at the stand did not just stand and smile, they smartly and intelligibly talked about the activities of the company. There was an understanding of the subject, a love for the company and its product. But this humanity at the event stands is an independent and rare promotional material.
These two girls know their job and easily explain to AI a harsh IT person
Humble stand, smart product
Matler also has vacancies - including one managerial.
Further around the bend was the IFI Soft stand, which, as a former employee, of course, I could not get past. The girls had profiles in different programming languages, you could ask about the working conditions in the company, ask about products, get prizes. Problem solving was exchanged for a cute merch: what were the stickers “Programmers in Russia program in SI” and “For you, for us, for si plas plas” only cost.
Team of IFI Soft and Garda Technologies - working there, you will be in safe hands
I’ll add “gaps”: it’s true that this company works really well, projects are interesting, development is tangible. The vacancies on the site are in plain sight and there are few of them (ay, technological Nizhny Novgorod - where do you get so many vacancies from, why are you not in all these companies ?!).
Next is the stand of Lad IT company , a large IT company with Nizhny Novgorod roots and large-scale projects. At the booth there was just activity with virtual reality, it was possible to communicate with volunteer girls (actually employees of Lad IT company), to learn both about work and about projects. And their gentle hands supported fighters with virtual reality :-) Traditionally, the company has vacancies .
Part of Lad IT team - cool guys
Another part of the Lad IT team is a project manager with a super LED LED earring
Stand number one according to me
Did I say that the review is subjective? So, the number one stand for me was the Skilliks stand. You don’t know much about Skillix from the site (but you can leave a request for beta), so I found out about the project for you, because it seems to me that this is an important project for the Russian IT sector. At least - extremely interesting.
You give the emblem to each clan of developers. And in general, where are the elements of the Habré on the coat of arms ?!
The guys conducted a quest for front-end developers. Everyone could make up their own individual emblem of the developer, which consisted of skills. Each element is one of the tools. In the center of the "coat of arms" is the main programming language. Depending on the level of the developer, the appearance of the person in the hoodie changes. In the hands of the central character of the coat of arms is the framework, on top is the preferred module loader, below is the unit testing framework, on the sides is an identifier that frames the nickname in a telegram, Linkedin, GitHub or Stack Overflow. Moreover, it was necessary not only to fill out the questionnaire, but also to confirm their skills with one of the experienced validator developers who were at iFest in special t-shirts.
The idea was born out of the fact that many professions have their own identities, but developers do not. But as you probably already guessed, the issue is not in the arms. The company is developing a tool that will allow the developer to evaluate his current stack of skills and his level. There will be an ML model on board that parses data from open sources and has a competency graph.
You are not seniors, you are sirs! Angular, sir :-) Vue, sir!
The developer will be able to create his own profile and the system will show him: how much he “stands” on the market in the current region, which of his skills are becoming irrelevant, and which are the other way around, what needs to be taught and pumped in order to cost more or work in new areas, interesting teams, etc. Also, with the help of this tool it will be possible to analyze teams - structure, weaknesses and strengths. The system will be released in February. Beta will be closed - manage to get an invitation .
I couldn’t pass by :-) Creative from Freemake , and they also have vacancies
Summary and Evaluation
I have seen many festivals and conferences. And Nizhny Novgorod iFest had great advantages. Moreover, I got what I missed on others.
- Good time (autumn, Saturday) and a short duration (even a little was not enough, there was a desire to repeat).
- Free - I don’t know how unprofitable or profitable the festival turned out to be, but it seems to me that such events should be free or with a minimum payment, because they are the ones that can draw young people into IT, fall in love with the industry, drag them into new popular technologies.
- Reports that tell not about something very narrow, but reveal general principles, some of which can be brought to the company and started to be used from Monday. Yes, it’s nice to hear about “hardcore guts”, but you leave such reports in the state “They’re cool, and why, it won’t work on my prod.” Here people came out of the reports and discussed them, retold the contents - they were pleased, helpful and understandable.
- Few English-language reports. Many went to the magical Neska Elhauoij from the University of Massachusetts with a report on emotional artificial intelligence, and it was clear (thanks in part to the topic). But when the whole conference in English without a prompter (and with him too) you are just incredibly tired of a foreign language - burn out after 3-4 reports.
- Cool presenters who do not “block” the speakers.
These guys lit both halls of the festival, and these are great hosts.
My favorite view of Ankudinovka Technopark
Of the minuses - a little disorganization, a little crowd and categorically did not have enough bottled water, although there was a sea of drinking and food. And if the first and second among the minuses are honed from time to time, then without closed water in my hand it was very sad, and the glass kept threatening the camera. Well, these, of course, are trifles.
Special note
You probably noticed that I emphasized the vacancies of companies. Indeed, in our Nizhny Novgorod there are categorically not enough smart brains, it is difficult to find them even for a good salary. Maybe they just don't know much about cool jobs? Correct!
Well look, what a cry of the soul!
iFest ended, it was not enough a little and he was very impressed. It was a boring and serious event - such as should be a festival for IT people. I don’t know how about 256 shades of seigneur, but I definitely counted 256 shades of freedom and intelligence.