⇓ Video from the #SolCon ⇓
SolDevelo set some completely new goals for the new year to reach. One of them was to organize an external conference for people outside the company and on a much larger scale.#1 SolCon was one of the goals that we reached. After our first internal tech talk, which we called conference (as we held this event in a less formal atmosphere than usual) we supposed that whole knowledge about organizing this event was gained, but the situation was much more complicated than we thought.
After almost 3 months of preparations, the big day came. What was the most surprising and really unexpectable? Almost all 150 tickets for the event were “sold” in just 3 days! It is a great achievement, especially because we didn’t collect volunteers through a simple Facebook event where the only thing you need to do is one click to confirm one’s attendance. We used an external reservation system instead. Sooo… every guest took some time and effort to take part in our convention. Great information! They were really interested! Our event was already a success!
After facing all little trouble and minor obstacles in the meantime, #1 SolCon was for us a great milestone for the next, better and even bigger events.
Nothing would be possible if it was not four professional presenters! The program of the conference was the biggest encouragement for the guests. Prepared presentations created the opportunity to learn amazing things, and to gain knowledge that will be useful in future work.
Our brave, and wise guys are our pride! Let’s see (in shortened words what they prepared for their listeners.
The first presentation belonged to Mateusz, who told us quite a few things about the architecture role in the app design.
“Architecture plays a big part in application design. It’s good to know how modern architectural patterns work as it transfers directly to speed and effectiveness of the development process.
Domain-Driven-Design, CQRS, Event-Sourcing are hot-topics and for a reason, as they are proven effective. However, as with everything, you need to know when to apply it. In the presentation, I’m showing that it’s worth learning how these things work. That knowledge can significantly improve the performance of the team when you know how to apply the best tools in a given situation.”
After a longer break for the delicious pizza, we invited Damian on the stage. Damian has chosen Open Source subject and he pictured it as a hope for the future.
“The following presentation described the idea of open-source software. At the beginning, the question arose: What is open source? To answer this question and give some context to the whole concept, the story of one of the main characters in the open-source field was provided: Eric Raymond. Then the pros and cons were discussed. After that, we talked about new trends of the largest technology companies in this field. We couldn’t leave out the SolDevelo’s achievements in the area of propagating open-source software In the end, we talked about how a newbie developer without any commercial experience can start their contribution to the open-source code and community a person with no experience can begin to develop in the open source community.”
The third topic raised by Krzysztof was an overview of Amazon Web Services. His funny introduction drawn a lot of fans to him in the break.
“Hopefully, you remember, that we started right away from a riddle. With the obvious response (dunno what you were thinking…), we’ve established the fact, that Netflix is one of the biggest AWS customers. I tried to explain why such a big company would pick AWS in the first place! Throughout the presentation, I mentioned few important advantages that cloud computing gave Netflix, and these are:
- They don’t need to spend money on running and maintaining data centers – they can focus on building the best platform there is.
- Guessing system capacity is hard and can cost them a lot. With AWS they can scale out or scale in – in minutes.
- With plenty of features and services, they can experiment without large upfront commitment.
In the end, Netflix from a company that survived its own datacentre failure with deep wounds, emerged as a pioneer in chaos engineering, building high available cloud system using AWS
I hope it was useful for you!”
Sebastian was the last one, who presented a huge knowledge of the Atlassian Ecosystem.
“Jira remains one of the most popular tools to manage projects and it owes its popularity in big part to the huge community around Atlassian’s products. Thanks to the support they offer in installation, configuration and personalization of Jira, the solution to most of the problems is always at clients’ fingertips. Therefore, if you already use Atlassian products, or you are considering which tool to choose, this short presentation can help you discover how to effectively make use of the Atlassian’s ecosystem potential.”
As you can see, we provided a huge range of topics during our first conference in the #SolCon cycle. Next time we will try to narrow our presentations theme list.
We couldn’t get rid of the small contest! Congrats to the two winners, who will have a chance to use our SolDevelo gadgets!
The best thing from the conference, for me as an organizer, was feedback from the conference participants! So many kind words, so many ideas to improve for the future, and the best: so many thanks for starting such activity! Thank you all for being with us that day! Thank you for being a part of the new history in the IT events map in 3city!
