code.talks 2016. English version
I did not visit many conferences in my live. All of them, by the way, took part in Russia. And in most of them there were talks in english. English is not because speakers were asked to do so. code.talks 2016 also had some english-speaking sessions, but almost all speakers however were germans. So, germans spoke english to germans and some other guys like me. Even staff spoke english there. Can i consider this conference as “international”? I guess i can, but what about hosts? Do they think so too? Hmm, that is a tough question.
Every activity should be focused. If you try to seat on 2 chairs at the same time you will eventually fail. This is also true for IT world. You cannot be a super professional Java developer and at the same time be the best frontend engineer ever. You simply will not find enough time to catch up with all new technologies, frameworks and libraries for both of the “worlds”. The conference, at least english part definitely does not follow this simple rule of life. There were talks about different topics that were not related to each other at all, like AngularJS and Docker. Multiply this by 2 when you look at the agenda. Majority of talks were in German. Sometimes you do not have any choice at all, because only one English talk is available for a slot.
If you are a developer you would not find interesting talks there, because most of them will be about anything but not development. If you are QA you would face the same problem. What is even worse is that most of that topics were about things that i personally learnt long time ago.
However, code.talks were not so bad. Of course not. There were interesting presentations. Take for example progressive web apps, great Elixir talk or some others. They were good, really good. But that is not enough for 2 days event and 800 Euros ticket.
Hopefully, i cannot say so many bad things to the hosts themselves. Everything was at least not bad. Delicious food, all those chill out areas with old game consoles, billiard etc made the time spent there a little bit more colourful. Cannot say so for the place itself though. Old, industrial building that were about to fall apart with dirty walls, ugly toilets and stuffy rooms did not create a healthy atmosphere for discussions.
To sum up. It was okayish. Okayish if your aim is not to burden your mind with up to date talks, but just listen to something lightweight or something that you probably already forgot. Okayish if you do not care about 800 euros for the ticket that you could have spent for a small weekend somewhere in Spain for example. In the end, it was good to be there, it was great that this is over now and it is awesome that this will never happen to me again.
Originally published at code.aeremin.ru on October 10, 2016.