Do you want to know whether it is worth to spend 500€ for 2 days of DevDays Europe online conference? What are the current hot topics? And why do you need to know more about „Your software is bad.“?
Overall feelings
7 sessions at the same time, yet mostly not easy to find one worth watching.
I attended Online part of DevDays Europe 2023 on May 23-24. That was my 2nd Online developer conference and 3rd in total. Unfortunately the DevDays was the worst in terms of average session quality and organization. In case you have a brilliant speaker, why would you have 7 stages at the same time? The conference organization didn’t help to reveal great speakers easily so I sometimes ended up to start listening to 3 sessions at the same time to choose the one that may be interesting to me.
On the other hands this approach with a lot of speakers and sessions over 2 days may bring you a different perspective from people that are not so well known and you can find topics that suits precisely to your toolbox and skill set.
Session notes
The following session notes are rather in form of my personal notes than in form of awesome text. I will link webs / presentations wherever possible if you are interested in more depth.
Speeches took mostly 45 minutes and the best ones were typically the starting and ending sessions of the day.
Day 1 – May 23rd
Why is face to face better than Online?
You don’t have to check where does the „Connection lost“ come from.
1 – Congratulations, you failed! [Michiel Rook]
Speech of the day, but the bar was very low.
Failure is painful – We put off doing painful things as much as possible.
Failure != opposite of the success
- Failure = Opportunity to grow, discover and learning
Embrace failure, Induce failure, Fail fast.
- Make it cheap
- Do it PROUDLY
TDD – Test driven development == fail first development
Continuous delivery – small steps – small failures – easily fixable, less cost, less risk
Anti-pattern “Stop making mistakes” -> is like „Stop doing things“.
We need to be in “Learning organization” -> safe to fail
-> There is no 1 person to understand the whole complex system
-> We need observability
Recommended book Accelerate.
Everything and everyone fails.
Embrace it and get good at it.
How to break the cycle? Perseverance and keep enthusiasm.
Author blog for more info and one of his older presentations.
2 – How Did I Become a Tech Lead I Always Wanted to Have?
Mastery
- Facilitate – help your team do their jobs
- Advocate – keep the big picture in mind
- Motivate – guide your team to the best possible results
Always ask yourself – What’s next?
You need to have the 10 000 foot view in your head for good decisions.
Mitigate risk – go after parts that scare you the most – chase answers.
Side note: not great, not terrible.
3 – Let’s Retire Accountability & Commitment and Introduce a Better Way
Speech from the theoretical point of view about „standard“ vs „complex“ work. There is a great connection to what happened in industry and why agile has taken the place.
It is not possible to commit while creating complex systems due to a number of uncontrolled variables
Standard work vs Complex work
Conclusions and possible ways how to handle it
Take away
- There is a type of complex work where commitment and accountability doesn’t work. In those cases we need:
- An empirical approach to risk management
- Those doing the work being trustworthy and dependable
- A new way to collaborate (together with the customer)
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