And now for something completely different….
I wanted to share some details about a vitural conference I attended this past week called hack.summit(). https://hacksummit.org/ This wholly online conference is in its second year and is a good resource for people who would like to attend a conference and take advantage of some Q&A and workshops with leaders in our field. The cost for registration is mostly free, either a share on social media or a small donation
I attended the debut session of hack.summit() in 2014. The format is a combination of talks, Q&As and short workshops. One of the more memorable ones for me last year was an hour long session building a coffee shop locator from scratch in about an hour. Link
Here’s a short summary of the sessions I attended this year:
Floyd Marinescu – CEO of InfoQ.com – This session consisted mainly about how to establish suitable cultures for virtual teams, meaning teams that aren’t necessarily bound to the same office but must collaborate on projects from separate physical locations. There are suggestions around patterns and the myriad of tools that are available to virtual teams. This was interesting as I’m already working on a virtual team covering at least four separate locations. Additionally, there was mention of InfoQ and a recommendation to spend some time there to read up on current issues and have an opportunity to collaborate with others.
Kent Beck – Created Extreme Programming, created TDD, co-created Agile, authored 9 books – It’s ironic that this talk was the day before a half-day lunch and learn my team had on TDD and Dependency Injection. TDD is not a new paradigm but understanding the need for unit tests and structuring your code so that it’s testable on a granular level is vital for long term supportability of your codebase, especially if you’ve got multiple individuals working in that code base and for any inheritors of your code. I’m sure we’ve all inherited examples of stale (yet production) code with documentation with multiple birthdays and wish we had at least some insight as to why certain sections of code even exist.
Gregg Pollack – CEO, Codeschool – This was another ‘soft skills’ session presented by the CEO of Codeschool (recently acquired by Pluralsight) titled ‘ The Developers Path to Success and Winning’. This was a general discussion of components that would help you build a successful career as a developer, including how to seek out a mentor, attending meetups and conferences, knowing what’s important enough to demand your attention (being deliberate about your work and learning), how to seek out work to stretch yourself, etc.
Janet Weiner – Engineering at Facebook, big data expert – Open Data Challenges at Facebook – I’ll admit that the bulk of this talk was way over my head. Overall, it was a case study on how data availability presents problems as it scales to unprecedented quantities, using Facebook’s architecture as an example. While I’m not very familiar with ‘Big Data’ yet, it’s definitely on my radar as something to become familiar with in the near future. This was a good example of a presentation showing me exactly how much I don’t know!
Mostly I enjoyed the ability to attend virtually and the ability to go back as needed to cover things I might have missed. If you’d like to register and access the content, it’s not too late! All you’ll need to is go through the registration process at the hack.summit() website and you’ll have access to all of the talks and reference materials.
If any of you is curious about (or may have attended) hack.summit() 2016 or have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.
Thanks for looking in!