But here in Siberia ...
There are not so many conferences and meetings taking place outside the Urals, and in my hometown a search for âcoworkingâ generally gives a restaurant with a worldwide fast food chain. Therefore, I love the various events where you can listen to the reports of experienced and bold speakers in a society of smart people. Fortunately, Novosibirsk is pretty close to me, considered if not the capital of Western Siberia, then definitely a very important point on its map. There, activity is boiling up, including IT activity.
We were met at the entrance and divided alphabetically into halves
And when I found a link to the conference website on https://gdg-siberia.com on the Internet, I decided that it was worth going. Moreover, the DevOps section was planned, which means that the discussion was not only about patterns, components, architecture and frameworks. Familiar terms related to Kubernetes flickered on the schedule, and I thought: âGreat, they will talk about something familiar.â The event was held in a kind of "local Skolkovo" - Academpark.
Academpark in winter is the same, but slightly sprinkled with snow
Do you speak English?
Presenter on the background of the schedule with seals
Many conference reports were announced in English, but I believe that IT specialists in the 21st century will not be scared. If you make the conference only in Russian, then many - but what is there, most foreign speakers simply will not come. Therefore, already at the official opening (on the second day), the organizer in sneakers on luminous soles greeted everyone in decent English and unobtrusively, diluting his speech with a joke or two, told us what awaits us here. An interesting move: the host suggested right in the hall to do a very important thing - to find a person you donât know and talk with him for about two minutes. Personally, my experiment was successful, chatted with a neighbor on the left. It was more difficult for those who came as a large team, they did not have strangers nearby.
The seals are still mi-mi-mi, and the badges (in the future) are alive
The very eco-friendly badges that sprout flowers
I liked the style of the conference. The site, banners and merch were designed in the same style, and even âtaking care of the environmentâ: badges were printed on cunning paper (reminiscent of recycled materials) with seeds embedded between the fibers. Plant this badge in the ground and do not forget to water it, and in memory of the conference you will grow a bouquet of flowers (or something else, the organizers themselves do not know for sure). Some participants said that they overdid it with cats. Dog breeders, probably. Interested in the conference website: constantly offers to refresh the page with a pop-up dialogue. Since this is still a GDG (obviously, something related to the Good Corporation), their site, apparently, was made according to the canons and covenants of Big Brother. There is even a mobile application, right according to the canons of âmobile firstâ (and the new trend, they say, âmobile onlyâ), but I did not find any differences from the tab in the browser with the site. I really liked the feedback system for each report, the QR code from the projector was read in 90% of cases, and in the survey form it was all about the case.
Advertising. Advertising never changes
Selectel generously gives out prizes in exchange for filling out a questionnaire
The stands of the sponsoring companies did not seem unique to me, but each had its own highlight: Selectel immediately, on the very first day before the opening, a large crowd lined up - to participate in a win-win lottery. The luckiest ones got towels or screwdriver sets for electronics repair, and I got a super prize - a curtain for a webcam for paranoids. I am glad that I was not alone, and 3000 bonuses for hosting services in the kit pleasantly warm my soul. The company with the slogan âWe are for C ++â and fintech software had a barista - as for me, his coffee was much tastier than from catering. One small but proud bank brought souvenir badges and stickers, and placed a very controversial cat on the banner. That's all, itâs even a little pity that there were so few stands from sponsors, but advertisements were done in other ways. Teams (from one to ten people) of participants in branded T-shirts and hoodies roamed the halls, and some speakers without false modesty demonstrated abstracts from the stage using the examples of their companies' products.
And ladies can do IT
IT lady has something to tell from the stage
What I think is worth mentioning is the WTM. It stands for Women Techmakers Meetup, an event that took place on day zero. (True, I did not participate in it.) Still, 2019 is in the yard, and the global trends of the phenomenon called âdiversityâ are relevant even in Siberia. There were quite a few participating girls, according to my impressions, 10 percent of the total number of guests. And so, most of the participants and speakers are white men, there's nothing to be done. However, I will not develop this hollywood theme, after all, an article about something else.
And the simple breaks
Despite the fact that the site and the application are as simple as three pennies, the schedule is constantly updated almost every 5 minutes. DevOps, where without it! The principle of âContinuous Deliveryâ. Once they even noticed a failure: the schedule stopped loading in the mobile application. Everyone was perplexed: âHow can this be broken ?!â The problem was fixed quickly, but this happened enough during the conference. I donât want to offend or hurt the organizers - in general, the work has been done a lot and many chips really worked, but, nevertheless, the guys can and should grow up to the level of Oleg B. conferences. If you compare these two conferences - and now they can be compared, because recently Highload ++ Siberia has also been launched in Novosibirsk - the price of the entrance ticket from DevFest is symbolic.
(Workshop - âcollect something new yourself, it will come in handyâ)
However, I'm all about the organization! This, after all, is the little things in life, the essence of almost any IT conference - in live communication aka networking, and for introverts like me, in speaker reports. There were also workshops on day zero, but for a number of reasons I couldnât get there, so next year it makes sense to go again.
According to reports: feelings, impressions, opinion
(A typical speaker. And he also knows how to promote his brand!)
The reports sounded different. They were divided according to the level of entry into the topic (it was indicated on the site), some especially exciting topics were discussed later in the conference chat. Below I will briefly describe my impressions of the performances that I remember most of all. If the readers of this blog were present at the conference and share their impressions about the remaining reports in the comments, I will be grateful.
1. DevOps: A Love Story
A mother of three children from the USA very interestingly and unconventionally talks about how she came to IT, and specifically to DevOps, and compares her work with everyday things from her life. I think, not only I noted to myself, they say, that's how it happens, however.
2. Cloud Native, Service-Meshed Java Enterprise With Istio
An IBM engineer with an excellent rebus on a T-shirt tells and on the go shows a demo how to work with the service mesh, what tools to use, and what opportunities are opened up.
3. The platform is dead, long live the platform
The report was not particularly impressive. Another story from the series "How Everything was OK with Us, but Then Something Been Missing." As a result, the company is on the way to migrating all components to the cloud of one of the monsters of this technology, and recommends not to worry about the vendor lock problem.
4. Build your own Internet of Continuously Delivered Things
An interesting report about IoT. We learned what pitfalls come across for startups when testing smart bulbs. This has its own peculiarities, because you need to test a close bunch of software and hardware, and even extremely limited in resources.
5. Becoming a Good Programmer
One of the âhypeâ reports made a pretty strong impression on me. The speaker brought us his vision of a new, better world, where developers think not only about money and closed tickets for the day. We need to think first of all about where we are all going to this world, developing software and various systems that are often used for selfish or openly harmful purposes.
6. How to sell yourself for fun and profit
Another not quite technical report from the master of the genre Baruch Sadogursky. Read smart books, become a speaker and a media person, always be nice, and people will reach for you. And they will even be ready to pay you more, because the mark-up for the brand is found not only in expensive boutiques.
7. When there are too many microservices, or why did we make our chat solution a monolith
A great start to a new day - the speaker in paints showed what common problems with communication between the business and the development department, as well as different development teams between themselves can turn into, coupled with blindly following fashion trends. In the end, everything ended well - the project was closed.
8. DevOps patterns and antipatterns for continuous software updates
Another report from a man in a hat from JFrog, quite useful in work and for understanding where and why such an integral aspect of our life as software updates is moving. Bottom line - you need to update "per hour on a teaspoon", i.e. often and little by little, then users do not have a negative, and the inevitable problems will be easier to solve.
9. Serverless and Functions as a Service (FaaS). How to build modern backend for PWA and mobile apps
A report from a distinguished speaker with an audience of regular listeners. He opened the door to Serverless for us, briefly explained what can be done there and why, having demonstrated this using a living example in one of the popular three-letter clouds. If a person was allowed to sleep before the performance, it would be even better.
10. Where is my cache? Architectural patterns for caching microservices by example
A contradictory report, after which the developers came out with remarks like "I was waiting for answers to my painful questions, but I heard some kind of advertisement." Perhaps the product is good, but the demo didnât show any advantages, and I was once again convinced of the advantages of Kubernetes + service mesh
11. No Bulls * it Freelancer
For me - a great end to the conference. A speaker with good experience in public speaking, not embarrassed by a strong word, showed us on gifs that you should not be afraid to go to freelance. If you are still not attracted to stability and bloody enterprise - as a freelancer you (probably) will really like it.
Communication on the sidelines often took place in English
This is about the thoughts and feelings caused by the reports. But I would also like to share such a general feeling: we are not even isolated in Russia, but in cold, snowy Siberia, so far from the rest of the world. Speakers from all over the world come to us, from Berlin and London to Argentina and Australia. They are interested here, and there is some kind of exotic for foreigners in Siberia in the winter. And our people, in turn, listen quite attentively, understand humor, ask practical questions and support conversation in the dining room.
Why I love conferences - you can learn a couple of clever phrases
Such conferences can also show âwhere the wind blowsâ, what is in fashion now, and what is actively developing and will be on everyoneâs lips next year. What is even more interesting is that in local communities (of the same Siberia), such conferences to one degree or another set trends. Here are inaccurate, from memory, quotes from some reports:
- âKubernetes has already won the war for container orchestrationâ
- âService Mesh has a great future, and it will come very soon.â
"In the end, they got a monolith, but then they still sawed it into two microservices"
Then I remembered the youth and current audiences at the university
Instead of output
As it is fashionable to say today, âthe author does not call for concrete actions,â but I still think that a lot of interesting things are being done now in some way closer to Open Source. Many successful, and not so, companies around the world every day lay out a code of varying degrees of readiness on github or other less popular sites. As one good man wrote on his website: âInformation wants to be freeâ. It seems to me that this is very different from the situation at the beginning of the 2000s, when the written code was valued as intellectual property and kept, if not in a safe, then on seriously secure servers. The most interesting listings are now stored in reliable places, I am sure, but the variety of open and free tools pleases. If you wish, you can not pay for software - after all, modern society now sells more services than objects of the material or intangible world. Yes, everyone can download, for example, Kubernetes, but not everyone will configure it and will work with it without a headache.
If you are interested, we have courses on working with the now popular, but difficult to master âwith a snapâ modern tools that will be useful to any serious IT specialist.
Thank you for your attention, waiting for your opinions on the conference, trends in the IT world and the author in the comments.