During the pandemic, we have all learned to live online. Numerous events moved to the web, which made it possible to participate in many interesting conferences from different parts of the world, such as DevDays Europe or DevOpsPro Europe.
At the same time, some conferences, such as Code Europe, are worth experiencing offline: interesting people, an amazing atmosphere, and the opportunity to talk with experts face-to-face and spend a great time is exactly what we all missed during the pandemic.
Naturally, COVID or not, ITMAGINATION is dedicated to raising competencies and skills of our employees. We all may take courses that are valuable for us via the company-provided Udemy subscription, and we may attend conferences that raise our competencies. In this post, Andrzej Frydryszak, a .NET & Cloud Developer at ITMAGINATION, shares with us his experience at the conferences.
In April, I had the pleasure to attend the Dev Days Europe, which is an online conference. As a .NET & Cloud developer, I got very lucky. There were some lectures focused on the .NET 6 architecture and the evolution of moderns APIs.
I learned about the differences between the few .NET versions, with migration options between the technologies. I attended a rather fascinating lecture on making every piece of software as a Service, with modelling the functionalities as entities with an API, production code and state, which enables modelling our solutions as a mesh of overall models.
The conference ended with a talk about deep fakes and the way they are made. A modern problem was defined and ways of dealing with it were presented. You may say the conference enlightened me.
At the end of May, I attended another online conference, the DevOps Pro Europe, and I must say, I got lucky again. Since I am currently in the middle of my preparation for the CKAD exam, Kubernetes is a technology I am digging deep into, now
The conference talks gave me a more practical approach with a focus on choreography, multi-container orchestration and serverless solutions using K8s. I also learned about building agile teams and got treated with some SCRUM skepticism.
The culmination point was a lecture which contained the definitions of 15 principles of Designing and Deploying Scalable Applications on K8s. A more comprehensive article explaining them in detail to come 😉.
In the beginning of June, I attended an in-person conference, Code Europe. The first part took place in Gdańsk’s Shipyard with an amazing adaptation of one of the historic construction halls. The second one took part on the Warsaw National Stadium. A fortunate addition to the conference experience was a chance of meeting new people between lectures.
As for the talks and it’s topics, the approach was to mix various concepts of application development and DevOps instead of breaking it into separate conferences. During the conference I was able to attend lectures on topics that were new to me, such as blockchain, robotics and machine learning, as well as those extending my existing knowledge and experience.
The most relevant talk I attended was about software development myths that slow our progress. The conference ended with a talk from Bjaarne Stroustrup, the creator of the C++ language.
Andrzej is only one of our developers who recently attended a conference. He chose to participate in these three: you might have chosen differently, and that’s alright. If there’s a conference for you out there, we will most likely be okay with having you attend it, and will, most likely, pay you as if you had a normal working day, given that this will help advance your skillset. Our reasoning is simple: acquiring knowledge and training are important to us, just as much as writing high-quality code.
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